Itamar Gilad
Itamar Gilad is a product coach, author, and speaker with over two decades of experience in senior product roles at Google, Microsoft, and various startups. He is also the author of Evidence-Guided: Creating High-Impact Products in the Face of Uncertainty and publishes a popular product management newsletter.
Communication Skills
Visualizing goals through a metrics tree enables cross-functional teams to align on the highest-impact work regardless of team boundaries.
"I've seen cases where team B put aside their own ideas to jump on the ideas of team A, because of this model [the metrics tree]."
Leadership Skills
Presenting hard evidence from small-scale experiments is the most effective way to challenge the opinions of strong-willed founders or executives.
"If you come with data, if you run a secret experiment and you come back and you show them you usually get one of two results. Either they get extremely mad at you... But the more common case is they'r..."
The Confidence Meter provides a standardized scale to grade the strength of evidence, preventing 'gut feelings' from being treated as facts.
"I created a tool called the confidence meter... It goes from very low confidence which is the blue area... all the way to high confidence which is the red area and you can see the numbers going from z..."
Product Management Skills
A true North Star metric should measure the specific unit of value delivered to the user, distinct from the value the business captures.
"The North Star metric measures how much value we create for the market. For example, let's take WhatsApp. WhatsApp for a very long time measured messages sent because every message sent is a little in..."
Use the ICE framework to move prioritization from a battle of opinions to a transparent, evidence-based evaluation.
"I suggest using ICE, impact, confidence and ease. I think I have a slide coming on this. So impact, confidence and ease which is basically a way to assign three values to each idea."
Shift from 'release roadmaps' (dates and features) to 'outcome roadmaps' (goals and metrics) to maintain flexibility for discovery.
"I recommend using outcome roadmaps saying by October we want to achieve this outcome. By Q4 we want to launch in another three countries, or we want to grow our usage in India by that much... Otherwis..."
Deconstruct high-level goals into a metrics tree to identify the specific levers teams can influence to drive the North Star.
"Once you have these two [North Star and Top KPI], you can further break them down into what I call metrics trees. So there's a metric three for the North Star metric and there's the metric three for t..."
Use 'faked' versions of a product (Wizard of Oz or smoke tests) to validate the core value proposition before writing production code.
"Initially you fake it, you do a fake door test, you do a smoke test, Wizard of Oz tests. We used a lot of those in the tabbed inbox by the way, one of the first early versions was actually we showed t..."
Utilize a progression of testing—from 'fish fooding' (team testing) to 'dogfooding' (company testing) to alphas—to increase confidence iteratively.
"Initially you fake it, mid-level tests are about building a rough version of it... those are early adopter programs, alphas, longitudinal user studies and fish food. Fish food is testing on your own t..."