Blog - Page 6 of 8 - Itamar Gilad

Stop Obsessing Over Development Velocity, Focus on This Instead

Anti-Patterns, Prioritization, Product Discovery, Product Operating Model

An awful lot of effort is going these days into boosting product teams’ productivity: getting them to burn those story points faster, deliver the planned scope in every sprint and cycle, and generally ship more stuff, faster. The term “development velocity” is often thrown around by executives, but what they’re actually aiming for is upping […]

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Opportunities and Threats — The Building Blocks of Strategy

Product Operating Model, Product Stategy

It was mid 2004 and my colleagues and I were gathered in a cinema hall in Tel Aviv to hear our American CEO speak. The charismatic gentleman on stage was all smiles and positive energy. He told us he was proud of what we had achieved that year. There was one topic, though, that made

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Planning and Execution in a Time of Crisis

Product Operating Model, Product Stategy

The Coronavirus pandemic has turned into a global health and humanitarian crisis. But even when we will beat it and go back to work things will not be as they were. There are clear signs of a global economic recession, if not a full depression. There’s much uncertainty, but it’s likely that for a number

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Breaking The Walls Between Business and Agile Teams

Frameworks and Tools, PM Role and Skills, Product Operating Model

Managers and product managers are often frustrated by the apparent lack of care the development team is showing for the needs of the business. The team is forever busy with engineering and design projects (some visible and some well hidden), while business-critical projects are dragging on at a snail’s pace. When a long-awaited product or

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The Three True-North Metrics that Your Product and Business Need

Frameworks and Tools, Metrics and Data, Product Stategy

Imagine finding yourself in an elevator with your CEO or top investor. After a brief hello she lands the big question on you: “How is the product doing?” You have 30 seconds to answer. A simple “all good” won’t cut it — you need numbers. Your mind runs through your dashboard. Each metric conveys a

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Idea Validation — Much More Than Just A/B Experiments

Experimentation/Validation, Frameworks and Tools, Product Discovery

UPDATE: I published a longer and far more detailed explanation of these techniques in my free eBook Testing Product Ideas Handbook Here are a few important things to know about product ideas: 1) the vast majority of ideas lead to no measurable improvements in business results or value-to-customer (some actually cause negative results) 2) No one, no matter how senior

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5 Ways Your Company May Be Misusing OKRs

Anti-Patterns, Goals and OKRs, Product Operating Model

UPDATE: I published a free eBook that covers OKRs best practices and pitfalls in-depth: OKRs Done Right. Since their invention at Intel in the early 1970s, Objectives and Key Results have amassed a huge following. It certainly helps that Google, Amazon, Dropbox and other tech super-companies attribute so much of their success to them. John

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The GIST Board and Other GIST Tools

Frameworks and Tools, PM Role and Skills, Product Discovery, Roadmaps and Planning

Ever since I started writing about the GIST framework (Goals, Ideas, Steps, Tasks) and helping teams implement it, the question the comes up the most is “what tool should we use?” While I don’t think tools are are as important as we tend to think, in this post I’ll give you a few options, including a new tool that

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10 Ways to Build More Value Into Your Product

PM Role and Skills

Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value. — Albert Einstein Value for user (as opposed to value of a user) is a critically important product concept. It’s at the bottom of product/market fit, growth, revenue and basically much more. Few things help products more than injecting them with lots and lots of value.

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GIST for Personal Planning

Frameworks and Tools, PM Role and Skills

Staying productive is as challenging to me as it is for most people. Procrastination, constant feeling of not doing enough, working long hours — I have all the symptoms. However, as I started working with companies and observed their notion of productivity, often keeping everyone busy chasing projects that lead nowhere, I started seeing the flaws in

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