SUNDAY REWIND: The GIST Framework by Itamar Gilad

Itamar highlights three types of product launches:

1. Positive – where a product is launched and is incrementally improved upon. These are very rare.
2. Negative – where launches are so bad they get rolled back.
3. Middle – this is where most things launch and not much changes in the business. This is the space where we spend most of our time.

Many products don’t make an impact because of failures in planning and execution, he says, and he runs through his GIST framework as a way of preventing this.

Itamar’s framework has four levels of planning:

1. Goals, which tell us what we are trying to achieve
2. Ideas, which are hypothetical ways to achieve the goals
3. Steps, that develop the ideas and test them
4. Tasks, the things that fall out of the steps level to build

The talk focuses first three levels – Goals, Ideas and Steps

Goals

Good goals answer two questions:

1. Where do we want to be and by when?
2. How do we know when we are there?

We need to use metrics to answer these questions, specifically impact metrics and outcome metrics.

Ideas

Everyone has ideas and most aren’t very good. At Google and Bing, only 10-20% of experiments generate positive results. Itamar suggests we should put all ideas into an Idea Bank and then rank them using the ICE (Impact, Confidence and Effort) scoring system.

Steps

We should validate ideas as quickly as we can to generate results and then feed them back into our Ideas Bank and update our ICE scores.

Watch the original video: The GIST Framework by Itamar Gilad

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