Becoming evidence-guided | Itamar Gilad (Gmail, YouTube, Microsoft)

You fake it. You do a fake door test. You do smoke tests, wizard of all tests. We used a lot of those in the tab inbox, by the way. One of the first early versions was actually We showed the tab inbox working to people, but it wasn't really Gmail. It was just a facade of HTML. And behind the scenes and according to the permissions that the users gave us, some of us moved just the subject and the sender into the right place. So initially the interviewer kind of distracted them and then showed them their inbox. And then it the top fifty messages were sorted to the right place, more or less, if we got it right. And people were like, Wow, this is actually very cool. But it gave us some evidence to go and say, Hey, we should try and build this thing. Welcome to Lenny's Podcast, where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful products.

Today my guest is Itamar Galad. Itamar is a product coach, author, speaker, and former longtime product manager at Google. Where you worked on Gmail, identity, and YouTube. He also just published an awesome new book called Evidence Guided, creating high impact products in the face of uncertainty. Itamar has an important perspective on why and also how you can push your team and organization from an opinion-based decision making process to a more evidence-guided approach. In our conversation, Itamar shares a number of very practical and handy frameworks to do just that, including the confidence meter, metrics trees, gist, and the gist board.

Plus his take on how people often misuse ice for prototizing ideas, also how you can make your OKRs more effective, and so much more. Enjoy this episode with Ithamark a lot after a short word from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Ezra, the leading full body cancer screening company. I actually used Ezra earlier this year. Unrelated to this podcast. Completely on my own dime.

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