Itamar Gilad: belief

Transcript context

…You have this concept of being evidence guided. People listening may feel like, "Hey, we're evidence guided, we're in experiments, we make decisions using data." Oftentimes they aren't actually and so what are signs that maybe you're not actually that evidence guided or as evidence guided as you think you are? I think there's a few telltale signs that I look for, first the goals are very unclear. Either there are many or they're very kind of obscure and vague or they are about output, there's misalignment. So the goals part is not there, usually this goes hand in hand with metrics. Missing metrics or just using revenue and business metric but there's no user facing metrics. So that's another telltale sign, then there's a lot of time and effort spent on planning especially on road mapping. Creating the perfect roadmap which really can consume a lot of time of the top management and PMs, etc. Then as you go down you see there's not a lot of experimentation and if there is experimentation there's not a lot of learning and finally another telltale sign is that the team is disengaged. So the engineers are kind of getting the signal that what they need to do is deliver, they're focused on output, that's what they're measured on. So they're kind of disengaged, they're disengaged from the users, from the business, they don't care that much. It's usually something that you can fix by adopting a more evidence guided system. Okay. So let's dive into your approach to becoming more evidence guided. In the book, you share this model that you call the GIST model which is kind of this overarching approach to building a product that almost forces you to be more evidence guided. So let's just start with what's the simplest way to understand this GIST model?…

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