In this podcast, strategy expert Itamar Gilad shares insights on evidence-guided strategy. Topics include uncovering strategic opportunities, exploring and validating ideas, and connecting goals, ideas, and opportunities. A discussion on the success of Netflix streaming and additional resources concludes the episode.
To create successful strategies, it is essential to start with evidence-based insights and validate opportunities before implementation.
Collecting strategic opportunities requires various approaches such as research, analysis, and validation through evidence and early adopter programs.
Deep dives
Ida-Malgilab's Career and Focus on Evidence-Guided Development
Ida-Malgilab has had a successful career as a product person in companies like Google and Microsoft. In recent years, he has been coaching and teaching teams about evidence-guided development, which has become the emphasis of his work.
Ida-Malgilab's Book on Strategy
Ida-Malgilab published a book to teach people how to work in a build, measure, learn way and be more goal-oriented and customer-centric. He emphasizes the need for tools, frameworks, and models to support the implementation of these ideas. The key model he discusses is called "breaking the change," which breaks down the strategy process into goals, ideas, steps, and tasks. The book also explores how to bring evidence-guided development thinking to an entire company and build strategy around discovery, setting missions, goals, metrics, and driving adoption.
The Evigance Guided Company and Strategic Approach
In the second half of his book, Ida-Malgilab introduces the concept of the Evigance Guided Company and discusses how such a company should approach product strategy. He presents a before-and-after comparison of a company called Akmai Invoice, which is in the business of creating invoices for large organizations. The traditional approach to strategy is presented as a roadmap full of unvalidated ideas, while the Evigance Guided approach is described as a multi-level discovery process that involves identifying opportunities, validating those opportunities, building a small team around them to achieve product-market fit, and eventually building a real project and organization based on the opportunity. This chapter provides insights on how to develop and validate strategies in a more effective way.
Collecting Opportunities and Validating Strategy
One of the challenges highlighted by Ida-Malgilab is collecting strategic opportunities. He suggests various approaches, such as qualitative and quantitative research, customer interviews, data analysis, competitor analysis, technology exploration, and bottom-up approaches. He emphasizes the importance of finding opportunities that can create significant value and explores the idea of a task force to validate opportunities instead of relying solely on existing teams. Validating strategy, in terms of finding product-market fit for a specific opportunity, is also discussed, with recommended methods including surveys, customer behaviors, and signing up customers for early adopter programs. The idea is to gather evidence that shows the opportunity is valid before proceeding with further development and planning.
Most companies' strategies are “roadmap on steroids”: large plans of multiple big ideas to implement, which usually have not been validated.
To differentiate and create thoughtful and successful strategies, you must start with evidence-based insights.
But how do we collect that evidence? How do we gain confidence and compare opportunities? After selecting opportunities, how do we keep validating the strategy through the multiple solution ideas we may pursue?
I had the pleasure of speaking with the evidence-guided guru, Itamar Gilad, and we explored the practices, tools, and challenges you will use and face to make your strategy more robust relying on solid evidence.
Itamar has been helping teams with tools and resources I strongly recommend, like the confidence meter, and ICE Scoring. He recently published his fantastic book, Evidence Guided, which is a must for all product managers and leaders.
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