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.
Discovery & Research Skills
Integrate discovery into the execution cycle by launching rough, incomplete betas and using real-world data to drive subsequent engineering tasks.
"Google, was what I call an evidence guided company. So essentially it put a high premium on focusing on customers, coming up with a lot of ideas on looking at the data, looking at how these ideas actu..."
Use low-fidelity tests like "Wizard of Oz" or "fake door" experiments to gather real evidence before investing in complex back-end development.
"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 the tabbed..."
Operating Cadence & Communication Skills
To effectively challenge top-down executive mandates, replace opinion-vs-opinion debates with discussions centered on objective evidence and data.
"I think what I would change is not have this discussion based on opinions, because when you have the discussion you come with your own opinions usually the most senior person's opinions will win. That..."
Planning & Prioritization Skills
Prioritization should be a collaborative process that enhances human intuition with rigorous evidence to ensure the most impactful ideas move forward.
"I think every successful product company out there that you look at Amazon, Airbnb, anyone you will check, at least in their best periods they found a way to balance human judgment with evidence. They..."