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

**Itamar Gilad** (0:00)
You fake it, you do a fake door test, you do smoke tests, 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 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 destructed them and then 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.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:43)
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 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.
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Itamar, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.

**Itamar Gilad** (4:39)
It's a pleasure being here. Thank you for inviting me.