Getting the GIST of Evidence-Guided Product Development (with Itamar Gilad, Product Management coach, speaker and author)

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Jan 15, 2023

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Itamar Gilad

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INSIGHT

Big Tech's Not a Template

Big tech companies aren't perfect examples to follow; their processes work for them, but not necessarily for others.
Focus on principles like customer value, experimentation, and empowered teams, which are universally applicable.

ADVICE

Copy Principles, Not Processes

Copy the principles of successful companies, not their exact processes.
Adapt those principles to your own context and create processes that work for you.

ANECDOTE

Gmail's Tabbed Inbox Story

Itamar Gilad shares how skepticism within his team at Google led to more data-driven decisions.
The "tabbed inbox" feature in Gmail resulted from this evidence-based approach.

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About the Episode

Itamar Gilad is a product coach, consultant and regular content author who's worked at IBM, Microsoft and Google. Nowadays, he's trying to help companies get away from the feature factory and into the world of evidence-based product development with the GIST framework.

A message from this episode's sponsor - Skiplevel

This episode is sponsored by Skiplevel. Do you struggle with communicating with dev teams and understanding technical terminology and concepts? On episode 98, I hosted Irene Yu, founder of Skiplevel, an on-demand training program that helps professionals and teams become more technical in just 5 weeks... All without learning to code. Learn the knowledge and skills you need to better communicate with devs and become more confident in your day-to-day role with the Skiplevel program. You can use referral code OKIP to support this podcast!

Episode highlights:

Big Tech firms aren't exemplars of how to "do product"

We look to these firms for guidance, but they all build products differently & have created processes that work for them. What they do have are principles. We should copy the principles but work the way that works for us.

Prioritisation frameworks have a place but aren't going to create your roadmap

The numbers are guesses but are useful to start conversations & make sure you're asking the right questions. It's important to revisit scores over time to see what's changing as you learn new things.

Confidence is a logarithmic scale

Itamar uses the Confidence Meter to describe the different levels of confidence. This brings to life what you are describing when talking about confidence & shows it's not linear; the best evidence is substantially better than the weakest.

Refocusing on goals gets you away from rigid roadmaps

Itamar uses the GIST framework (Goals/Ideas/Steps/Tasks) to break down opportunities, prioritise for impact & get away from the feature factory. It's important not to kill ideas too quickly, and continuously revisit them.

Product management is about principles

The principles are customer focus, evidence-guided decision-making, adaptive planning & empowering teams. These are the cornerstones of product management. Customer focus is still the most important & everything else can flow from there.

Contact Itamar

You can catch up with Itamar on his website, where you can sign up to his mailing list and get access to his tools. You can also connect with him on LinkedIn or Twitter.