How to become Evidence-Guided | Itamar Gilad (Author, ex-Google, ex-Microsoft)

Nov 13 2023 • 58 mins

Itamar Gilad is author of Evidence-Guided, which outlines a new product development meta framework called GIST. Itamar is also a speaker and a coach, previously working at Microsoft and Google. During his time at the latter, he came up with the idea for the tabbed inbox, which is now a core feature of the email product.

In today's episode:

• The risk of opinion-based development (Google +)

• A run through of Itamar's new GIST Evidence-Guided framework

• How to become evidence-guided in your company

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Itamar's contact and company info:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/itamargilad/

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/ItamarGilad

• Website: https://itamargilad.com/

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Where to find the host, Adam Wakeling:

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/adamjwakeling

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-wakeling-26494b35/

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In this episode, we cover:

(00:00) Preview

(00:45) Introduction

(02:40) The story of Google+ and why it failed

(05:23) The story of Gmail tabbed inboxes and why it succeeded

(08:40) Tabbed Inbox timeline

(09:58) GIST introduction

(11:44) How long it took to create GIST

(12:59) Difference between data- and evidence-guided

(14:11) Goals in GIST

(17:10) The challenge of the right Northstar metric

(19:30) Why Meta/Facebook's Northstar is not ideal

(21:16) Ideas in GIST

(23:10) Collaboration in ideas

(25:00) ICE for prioritization/evaluation

(27:25) Impact in ICE explored

(29:30) How to calculate confidence in ICE

(33:36) The right level of confidence

(35:35) Tabbed inbox research and analysis

(40:32) Example steps/AFTER framework

(43:12) PMs stuck in execution/feature factories

(47:32) Empowering others in Product Discovery

(51:02) Tracking Tasks to Goals

(52:52) How to integrate GIST into your business

(57:44) Outro