--- title: Why Most of What You Build Creates No Value | daily.dev description: At most one in three product experiments produce their expected effect, says Itamar Gilad, former Gmail product lead at Google, in this interview. He points to... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/why-most-of-what-you-build-creates-no-value-gclga6uqd twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Why Most of What You Build Creates No Value | daily.dev og:description: At most one in three product experiments produce their expected effect, says Itamar Gilad, former Gmail product lead at Google, in this interview. He points to... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/why-most-of-what-you-build-creates-no-value-gclga6uqd og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/gcLGa6uQD.png og:image:alt: Why Most of What You Build Creates No Value og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Why Most of What You Build Creates No Value **[Tech World With Milan](https://daily.dev/sources/techworld-with-milan)** · 17 min read · 2 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary At most one in three product experiments produce their expected effect, says Itamar Gilad, former Gmail product lead at Google, in this interview. He points to A/B test data, feature-usage power laws, and backward roadmap reviews as evidence that most shipped features barely move outcomes. Cheap AI coding doesn't remove the need for validation, he argues, since launch-and-iterate is an expensive way to learn and bad features bloat products. He describes his Confidence Meter, a 0-to-10 scale for how much evidence backs an idea, and says AI can help analyze data and summarize research but cannot substitute for real user testing. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### What percentage of product ideas or features actually create measurable value? At most one in three experiments or ideas produce their expected effect, according to analysis of A/B test data across companies. Feature usage also follows a power law, with many features barely used, and backward analysis of roadmaps over several years typically shows almost nothing moved key metrics in a major way. _Anyone deciding what to build next can weigh claims like this through daily.dev before committing engineering time._ ### Does cheap AI coding reduce the need to validate product ideas before building them? No, evidence-guided validation becomes more important, not less, when AI makes coding cheap. Validation was never primarily about saving coding time; it exists because shipping bad ideas bloats products with unused features and launch-and-iterate is an expensive, hard-to-measure way to learn, since many other factors change in parallel after a launch. _Teams debating how much to validate before shipping with AI-generated code can track this reasoning on daily.dev._ ### What is the Confidence Meter used in product management, and what scale does it use? The Confidence Meter is a tool for scoring how much evidence supports a product idea, on a scale from zero (no confidence) to 10 (a sure thing). Individual or group opinions give at most 0.1/10 confidence, paper reviews give up to 0.5/10, qualitative or quantitative supporting data gives up to 3/10, and actual post-launch data is the highest, most trustworthy category of evidence. _Engineers building a prioritization process can keep frameworks like this on hand through daily.dev._ ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Why Good Product Ideas Don’t Survive](https://daily.dev/posts/why-good-product-ideas-don-t-survive-zckp8fznc) · Itamar Gilad · 12 upvotes · 2 comments - [The AI era requires a different kind of experimentation.](https://daily.dev/posts/the-ai-era-requires-a-different-kind-of-experimentation--zypuzbx6t) · Elena's Growth Scoop · 1 upvotes · 0 comments - [Why AI apps fail in production](https://daily.dev/posts/why-ai-apps-fail-in-production-lqxgztuey) · Google Cloud · 1 upvotes · 0 comments - [The feature is cheap to code, so we might as well build it. \(Probably not\)](https://daily.dev/posts/the-feature-is-cheap-to-code-so-we-might-as-well-build-it-probably-not--fsotesh3m) · Medium · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Building May Be Cheap Now. Being Wrong Still Isn't.](https://daily.dev/posts/building-may-be-cheap-now-being-wrong-still-isn-t--njqjpilrm) · Viget · 0 upvotes · 1 comments --- Tags: [#ai-agents](https://daily.dev/tags/ai-agents), [#career](https://daily.dev/tags/career), [#product-management](https://daily.dev/tags/product-management), [#ab-testing](https://daily.dev/tags/ab-testing) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/why-most-of-what-you-build-creates-no-value-gclga6uqd) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Why Most of What You Build Creates No Value","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/why-most-of-what-you-build-creates-no-value-gclga6uqd","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/why-most-of-what-you-build-creates-no-value-gclga6uqd"},"datePublished":"2026-10-29T16:10:04.716Z","dateModified":"2026-10-29T16:11:07.312Z","description":"At most one in three product experiments produce their expected effect, says Itamar Gilad, former Gmail product lead at Google, in this interview. 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