Becoming evidence-guided

Itamar Gilad, a product leader who worked on Google+ and Gmail's tabbed inbox at Google and later Microsoft, and author of the book Evidence-Guided, discusses why opinion-based product development fails and how evidence-guided methods can replace it. The conversation covers his GIST framework (Goals, Ideas, Steps, Tasks), metrics trees, the ICE prioritization method, the confidence meter, and how to adopt these practices gradually.

01Key learnings

• Build product from evidence rather than opinion; a leader's conviction should be tested with customer data, interviews, and experiments before committing resources.
• Define clear, user-facing goals first, and map them with a metrics tree linking a North Star metric (value created for users) to the top business KPI (value captured).
• Use ICE (impact, confidence, ease) to score ideas, and be honest about confidence using the confidence meter: opinions and themes count for almost nothing, while tests and data count for much more.
• Validate assumptions cheaply before building: start with fake doors, smoke tests, Wizard of Oz and concierge tests, then move to prototypes, early adopter programs, and finally A/B experiments.
• Treat steps as learning milestones rather than engineering milestones, and use a per-team GIST board that keeps delivery teams engaged in discovery, not just output.
• Don't adopt the whole system at once; identify your biggest problem (unclear goals, endless debates, too much building without learning, or disengaged teams) and start with the matching layer.
• Use evidence to challenge senior opinions respectfully; Gilad notes that well-prepared data often surprises leaders who then change course.

02Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.