How GIST can be Transformative as a Product Management Methodology
Goals, Ideas, Step-Projects, and Tasks (GIST) is a product management framework created by Itamar Gilad during his time at Google. It’s lightweight, outcomes-focused, easy to understand and adaptable, making it ideal for most PM teams.
Goal-Led
Product management at its heart is creating value for a business or other institution. Hence being clear about what value needs to be created, or put another way, what outcomes need to be achieved, has to be the first step in being successful in product management.
Every product management leadership team’s primary responsibility has to ensure that there are clear goals set for the business and especially the product management team. The team’s focus then has to be on what they need to be doing to meet their goals.
What are some examples of great goals?
Increase sales revenue by 15% within the next 12 months.
Acquire 1,000 new customers in a given segment in the next quarter.
Reduce trial churn to 13% by the end of the fiscal year.
Once there are excellent goals in place, let the ideas come!
Ideas
In order for an organization to meet its goals, it needs to generate “ideas” on how it may do so. At this point, it’s important to consider any potential action as only an idea. It is essential to understand that the confidence that the idea can: a. help meet the goal, and b. has the biggest impact, is at this point very low.
There are always many sources of ideas. Ideas come from customers, sales, online reviews, inspiration during a PM’s morning run, competitors and engineering. It’s a key job - it’s the key job - of a product manager to manage all of these ideas and identify which ideas should be developed more, and by developed we mean to increase our confidence that it’s among the most valuable ideas.
Simply, ideas should map to a goal; and PM has to determine to what extent an idea can impact that goal and help the organization address it. At this point, on a high-level, the PM should be scoring ideas to determine which ones merit further work and with which priority.
Here are some examples of ideas for our goals:
Increase sales revenue by 15% within the next 12 months.
Create a new tier of premium service for largest customers.
Build a new service that can address the needs of a new customer segment.
Increase pricing by 20% in major markets.
Acquire 1,000 new customers in a given segment in the next quarter.
Add new features to address the needs of customers that are not purchasing.
Add new languages to enable the move to new countries.
Add sharing features to enable more product-led-growth.
Reduce trial churn to 13% by the end of the fiscal year.
Improve onboarding experience to help customers.
Request trial goals from customer to create a personalized experience.
Reduce trial duration in order to create a need for customers to complete trial.
Note that it’s important for teams to be continuously collecting ideas and storing them in an “idea bank” that can be a continuous source of possibilities.
Step-Projects
Most ideas need validation before they can be rolled out. Some validation tasks can be quite simple, some will require a lot more work. Here are some ways in which ideas can be validated:
using product analytics
creating prototypes and testing
optimization/AB/multivariate testing
customer out-reach
build landing pages to register interest (fake-door tests)
look for customers to partner on development
The key idea here is to create more certainty around the impact the idea can have on the goal, i.e. the value it can generate.
Let’s take the goal of adding 1,000 extra new customers, and the concept of adding features. As a PM, let’s say we work with sales to understand that they’re losing 100 sales per month because there is no dynamic workflow feature.
Hence in theory adding that feature will enable the business to make progress towards its goal. However, is the data from sales correct?
The idea needs testing. A PM can reach out to closed-lost prospects and ask them to confirm they would purchase the software with this feature (and how it drives value for them, and why it’s a must have). Another complimentary study would be to survey existing customers to see what impact this feature would make on their business. In doing this, the PM might learn that the business is likely to add 85 new customers per month; which gives more clarity and the idea can then be prioritized with respect to others.
Tasks
Tasks are the individual items that must be completed for an idea to be rolled out to customers. This of course will vary a lot depending upon the idea and the kind of work that needs to be done for rollout. Progress can be tracked using existing systems, processes and tools.
Why Use GIST?
Overall, GIST is an approach that clearly focuses on value creation and clearly communicates across an organization what’s being done to meet its goals, why choices were made and how confident the organization should be.
I’ve also seen it really focus teams and given them much more clarity on the direction they should be running in, with anecdotal increases in velocity and outcomes. What’s been incredible is feeling the positive energy from teams and the pride in ownership that comes from GIST.