Inverted Podcast #30 - Evidence Guided Product Management with Itamar Gilad

Good product management is not about shipping more. It is about creating value and using evidence to decide what is actually worth building. In this episode of the Inverted Podcast, we sit down with Itamar Gilad, author of Evidence-Guided Product Development and former Google product leader, to explore how evidence-guided product management applies to security, infrastructure, quality, and other products where success is often difficult to see or measure. Itamar introduces the GIST framework: Goals, Ideas, Steps, and Tasks, and explains why product teams should replace opinion-driven decision making with progressively stronger evidence. We discuss how security teams can define meaningful North Star metrics, why measuring security posture and coverage may be more useful than simply counting attacks, and how teams can connect security investments to broader business objectives. The conversation also explores one of the biggest challenges facing product teams today: AI makes it easier to build things, but that does not mean we should build more things. Itamar explains why faster development makes product discovery and validation just as important, if not more important, and why launching poorly validated features creates long-term complexity, maintenance costs, and product bloat. We dive into how different forms of evidence should carry different levels of confidence, from opinions and customer conversations to prototypes, fake-door tests, early adopter programs, experiments, and actual release results. And for security teams that believe their work is too difficult to measure, Itamar has a simple message: don't give yourself a free pass. Finally, we discuss why output-based goals and feature roadmaps can become dangerous, how outcome-based OKRs give teams more freedom to solve real problems, and why bottom-up goal setting can help product teams influence company strategy even when security is not one of leadership's headline priorities. Whether you work in security, infrastructure, developer tooling, quality, or traditional product management, this episode is a practical discussion about making better product decisions, learning faster, and staying focused on what ultimately matters: creating value for customers and the business. Chapters: 00:00 Introduction 01:19 What Is Evidence-Guided Product Management? 04:03 The GIST Framework 04:29 Finding a North Star Metric for Security 07:53 Security Posture as a Product Metric 10:33 Connecting Security to Business Priorities 14:30 Has AI Changed Product Discovery? 19:02 Different Levels of Evidence and Confidence 23:17 Measuring the "Badness Funnel" 24:48 Connecting Security Work to Company Objectives 27:44 Bottom-Up OKRs and Influencing Leadership 32:04 Why Output Goals Are Dangerous 36:23 Why Security Teams Don't Get a Free Pass 39:02 Creating Value Is Still the Job 🎧 Listen, learn, and join the conversation! 🎧 Find us on LinkedIn, Spotify, YouTube, Amazon Music/Audible, iHeartRadio or our website, and leave a message with your thoughts or questions. Check out our 🌐 website: https://invertedpm.com/ ✅ Like 👍 and Subscribe for more deep dives into the world of inverted product management! ✅ 🔗 Join the conversation in the Inverted Product Management community on LinkedIn. Inverted PM LinkedIn Group:   / 12902712   Spotify: Music by: Bensound License code: KQNVJHTWQEBEDSEA #ProductManagement #EvidenceGuided #EvidenceGuidedProductManagement #GIST #ProductStrategy #ProductDiscovery #OKRs #NorthStarMetric #Cybersecurity #Security #SecurityProductManagement #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #ProductLeadership #Experimentation #ProductDevelopment #InvertedPodcast #InvertedProductManagement #ProductManagers #Leadership #Startup #Innovation