Becoming evidence-guided

There's always like a trade-off between speed of delivery and speed of discovery, and that actually leads to the next layer of how do we combine the two? Because people tend to think it's an either/or.

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 inbox working to people. But it wasn't really Gmail, it was just a facade of HTML.

We come up with an idea, we believe in it, all the indications show it's good. Maybe the early tests show it's good, then we just go all in and we try to implement it and I made this very mistake many times as the product manager, I was the guy pushing for the ideas.

"This technique" refers to Gilad's evidence-based product development framework that combines goals, ideas, and step-by-step testing methods.

I don't know if they need this specific method. They're very... One thing I discovered by the way, there's two types of companies that really benefit from this technique. One is those companies that are kind of emerging into modern product development... and the other type is those companies that used to be evidence guided and they regressed.

We come up with an idea, we believe in it, all the indications show it's good. Maybe the early tests show it's good, then we just go all in and we try to implement it and I made this very mistake many times as the product manager, I was the guy pushing for the ideas.

Sometimes you need to roll back and change things, but it's another opportunity to learn.

It's not a engineering milestone or a design milestone, it's a learning milestone. So we build something and along the way we actually grow the scope of what we build.

There's always like a trade-off between speed of delivery and speed of discovery, and that actually leads to the next layer of how do we combine the two? Because people tend to think it's an either/or.

The North Star metric measures how much value we create for the market. For example, let's take WhatsApp. WhatsApp for a very long time measured messages sent because every message sent is a little incremental of value for the sender, the receiver.