Itamar is a coach, author and speaker specializing in evidence-guided product management and product strategy. For over two decades he held senior product management and engineering roles at Google, Microsoft and a number of startups. At Google Itamar worked at YouTube and led parts of Gmail.

Itamar is the author of the book Evidence-Guided: Creating High-Impact Products in the Face of Uncertainty. He also publishes a popular product management newsletter and is the creator of a number of product management methodologies including GIST Framework and The confidence meter.

Itamar is based in Barcelona, Spain.

Evidence-Guided Product Development

In the past few decades we’ve made major leaps forward in the way we design, develop, and deploy tech products. Product management, however, hasn’t evolved as much. We still invest time and effort into untested ideas, often on the basis of opinions, consensus, and rank.

In this talk I’ll suggest ways to supercharge our judgment with evidence. We’ll look at evidence-guided alternatives to roadmaps, backlogs, and decision-by-committee. I’ll show you the Confidence Meter — a tool to evaluate ideas based on evidence — and how you may use it to improve the quality of discussions and decisions. We’ll discuss what leadership means when the opinions of leaders carry less weight, and how teams may gain trust and empowerment by using evidence. Finally we’ll touch on the role of product managers in this brave new world.