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

... you fake it, you do a fake door test. You do a smoke test, Wizard of Oz test. 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 inbox working to people but it wasn't really Gmail. It was just a façade 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 they showed them their inbox, and in it, the top 50 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."

(instrumental music) 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 Gilad. Itamar is a product coach, author, speaker and former long-time product manager at Google, where he 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- 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 prioritizing ideas, also how you can make your OKRs more effective, and so much more. Enjoy this episode with Itamar Gilad 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, because my wife did one and loved it, and I was super curious to see if there's anything that I should be paying attention to in my body as I get older. The way it works is, you book an appointment, you come in, you put on some very cool silky pajamas that they give you that you get to keep afterwards. You go into an MRI machine for 30 to 45 minutes, and then about a week later you get this detailed report sharing what they found in your body. Luckily, I had what they called an unremarkable screening, which means they didn't find anything cancerous, but they did find some issues in my back which I'm getting checked out at a physical next month, probably because I spend so much time sitting in front of a computer. Half of all men will have cancer at some point in their lives, as will one third of women. Half of all of them will detect it late. According to the American Cancer Society, early cancer detection has an 80% survival rate, compared to less than 20% for late stage cancer. The Ezra team has helped 13% of their customers identify potential cancer early and 50% of them identify other clinically significant issues such as aneurysms; disc herniations, which maybe is what I have; or fatty liver disease. Ezra scans for cancer and 500 other conditions in 13 organs using a full body MRI powered by AI, and just launched the world's only 30 minute full body scan which is also their most affordable. Their scans are non-invasive and radiation-free and Ezra is offering listeners $150 off their first scan with code Lenny150. Book your scan at ezra.com/lenny. That's E-Z-R-A.com/lenny. This episode is brought to you by Vanta, helping you streamline your security compliance to accelerate your growth. Thousands of fast-growing companies like Gusto, Calm, Quora, and Modern Treasury trust Vanta to help build, scale, manage, and demonstrate their security and compliance programs, and get ready for audits in weeks, not months. By offering the most in-demand security and privacy frameworks such as SOC2, ISO 27001, GDPR, HIPAA, and many more, Vanta helps companies obtain the reports they need to accelerate growth, build efficient compliance processes, mitigate risks to their businesses, and build trust with external stakeholders. Over 5,000 fast-growing companies use Vanta to automate up to 90% of the work involved with SOC2 and these other frameworks. For a limited time, Lenny's Podcast listeners get $1,000 off Vanta. Go to vanta.com/lenny. That's V-A-N-T-A.com/lenny to learn more and to claim your discounts. Get started today. Itamar, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.