Product Management

HTTPS

HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure: an encrypted version of HTTP, which is used for secure onlinecommunications like banking, payments, email, and logging into websites.

HTTP

HyperText Transfer Protocol: a protocol used to view webpages on the internet. By "protocol," wemean a set of rules for how information should be transferred.

Value proposition

A short statement that explains why consumers would find a product useful. For instance, in 2015the e-book website Scribd used the value proposition "Read like you own every book in the world."

DevOps

Before DevOps, software was traditionally developed by an engineering team and then handed off to a separate IT group which would handle release management. As these were two distinct groups within the organization, these transitions took time and were not always as smooth as they could be. By placing both teams under the same umbrella and coordinating efforts throughout the entire process, DevOps organizations can release software faster, which is particularly important in continuous integration and continuous deployment environments, while benefiting from earlier and more frequent collaboration between software development and IT operations.

Market segmentation

Breaking down a huge, diverse market into smaller, more specific ones. For instance, a company couldsegment its market by gender, location, interests (also known as "psychographics"), and income (partof so-called "behavioral" segmentation).

Prototype

An early version of an app or website that lets app makers test their ideas with users. Prototypes canbe as complex as clickable websites or as simple as stacks of sticky notes.

UX Designer

The UX designer role occupies an interesting place in business today. It is one of the most sought-after skillsets, particularly at product-driven companies. Yet, many organizations seeking to hire UX designers have different (and sometimes inaccurate) ideas about what the role entails and the key responsibilities.

Ideation

The process of forming new ideas and mapping them out either visually through mindmapping, through a list, or simply through conversation. TERM IN ACTION: "Through some intensive ideation, we were able to come up with a groundbreaking idea."

URL

Uniform Resource Locator: A webpage's address, such as "https://maps.google.com" or"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Llama".

Pivot

Pivot in a product management context may refer to a shift in the strategic direction of the business. Usually the decision to pivot a product is the result of competitive changes, new findings about the market, or shortcomings in the original strategy.

PaaS

Platform-as-a-Service: tools that run an app for you you just need to send them your code.18 Between IaaS and SaaS in terms of complexity.

RAM

Random-Access Memory: a computer's "short-term" memory, which apps use to store temporaryinformation like which browser tabs you have open. The more RAM your device has, generally, thefaster it is.

User Research

User research is the discipline of learning about users' needs and thought processes by studying how they perform tasks, observing how they interact with a product, or by using other data-driven strategies.

R

A data analysis language, which lets you graph, summarize, and interpret huge amounts of data.

Node.js

A JavaScript framework for building the backend of web apps.

Open-source

A philosophy for building software where anyone can see, copy, and improve the code behind an app.(It's as if a restaurant let you see the recipes behind its dishes and suggest new ones.) Many popularapps and platforms are open source, like Linux, Android, Firefox, and WordPress. Manyprogramming languages and software development tools are also open-source.

REST

A popular type of API. APIs of this type are called RESTful.

Swift

Apple's language used for writing iPhone, iPad, and often Mac apps.

Material design

Google's design framework used for Android and many Google apps. It features bright colors, square"cards" of information, and sliding animations. It's similar to flat design, but it has some shadows,gradients, and 3D elements that flat design wouldn't have.

Market penetration

How much of a target market a product or industry actually reaches. For instance, there are about 30million teenagers in the US,27 and if a teen-focused social network had 6 million teenaged users, it'dhave 20% penetration of the teenager market.

Sprint Goal

In the scrum methodology for agile, sprint goals are clear objectives set before the beginning of a sprint. They are set by the product owner and delivery team collaboratively. Sprint goals should be easy to measure and should convey the underlying objective of the items in the sprint backlog.

IDE

Integrated Development Environment: a specialized app that makes it easy for developers to buildparticular kinds of software. Eclipse, for instance, is an IDE for Java and Android. It's like how chefshave their own specialized kitchens with particular tools and ingredients.

IP

Internet Protocol: a protocol for moving "packets" of information from one computer to anotherover the internet. Works closely with TCP. HTTP is built on top of TCP and IP.

Jira

Jira is a project management tool developed by Atlassian, an Australian software company. Jira is widely used by agile development teams to track of bug-fixes, stories, and epics.

Lifetime Value

Lifetime value represents the total amount of money your customer is expected to spend on your business, product, or service during their entire lifetime. TERM IN ACTION: "After some calculations, we theorized that the lifetime value is $1,000 per customer."

SDK

Software Development Kit: a pack of tools that help developers build apps for a particular platform,such as Android or Google Maps.

Vanity Metrics

Vanity metrics are statistics that look positive, but don't necessarily translate to any meaningful business results. Examples include quantity of social media followers or views on a promotional video. In reality, these numbers give you very little insight into how a product or initiative supports broader business objectives.

Unix

A family of operating systems including Linux and macOS.

FTP

A protocol for sending files to and from web servers.

AWS

Amazon Web Services: a platform that lets you store data or run apps in the cloud.

CPU

Central Processing Unit: the "brain" of a computer or phone, which runs the operating system andapps.

Assembly

Computers only think in 1's and 0's, and assembly language is just a slightly prettier version of 1's and 0's. Programmers rarely write in assembly language, since it's too much effort they'll usually write in a "higher-level language" that computers convert into assembly and then run. (Every other language in this section is a higher-level, or more "abstract," language.) It's like driving a car: instead of trying to directly set the speed of each wheel, you just use the steering wheel and pedals. This is far easier,and besides, you'd probably have no idea how to set the wheel speeds just right.

Server

Computers that power websites and many apps. Servers tend not to have screens, touchpads,microphones, or other gadgets. (Most don't even have keyboards and must be programmed remotely!)Instead, they're used solely for their computational might and gargantuan hard drives.

CDN

Content Delivery Network: a way for websites to serve images, CSS files, and other "static" assetsfaster by using a separate dedicated website. These dedicated CDN websites are specialized forholding files instead of running code, and they have many servers scattered around the world, soanyone can get the files much faster than normal.

Design Thinking

Design thinking is a framework for innovation based on viewing problems or needs from the user's perspective. Because this human-centered approach demands a thorough understanding of what your customers both think and feel, the design thinking process requires you first to empathize with the people for whom you're trying to design new solutions.

Designer

Designers make apps and websites beautiful and functional, and they also design stuff like logos,colors, and branding. There are many kinds of designers: UI, UX, visual, motion, and so on.

React

Facebook's web development framework for building web apps. Websites like Facebook, Instagram,Spotify, The New York Times, Twitter, and many others use React.

Feature Bloat

Feature bloat is a term to describe the result of packing too many features and functionalities into a product. Usually, this term is reserved for products that have become overloaded with extra "bells and whistles" features and are no longer able to perform their core function due to these extra add ons.

Features

Features are a product's traits or attributes that deliver value to end-users and differentiate a product in the market. For example, the battery life of an electronic device can be considered a feature. When it comes to software, product features can include any of the application's functionalities, capabilities, and even its visual characteristics.

GPU

Graphics Processing Unit: a special part of a computer optimized for drawing graphics. If you everhear the term "hardware-accelerated animation," that uses the GPU.

Wireframe

Having a visual representation of an interface in its most basic form can be critical in defining the User Interface. This bare visual representation is known as Wireframing. TERM IN ACTION: "While we had not created any substantial portion of our product, the Wireframe was a very promising start."

Idea Management

Idea management is a structured approach to generating and evaluating ideas that could help improve an organization's bottom line. In a product management context, idea management refers to a systematic framework for collecting, analyzing, and prioritizing ideas to improve existing products or create new ones.

Epic

In agile development, an epic represents a series of user stories that share a broader strategic objective. When several epics themselves share a common goal, they are grouped together under a still-broader business objective, called a theme. Another important distinction is that a user story can be completed within the timeframe of an agile sprint. An epic will typically require development work covering several sprints.

Iteration

In agile software development, an iteration is a set amount of time reserved for development. Typical iterations last 1-2 weeks, however, some may go as long as 4 weeks. Most agile development teams agree on the length of their iterations and proceed to operate on an iteration-by-iteration basis.

Persona

In product management, a persona is a profile of a product's typical user. Personas are used to help a product manager (and others in the organization involved with the product's development) understand key traits, behaviors, goals, responsibilities, and needs of a specific type of user. Product managers often document various personas, such as buyer personas, customer personas, and decision-maker personas, to better understand how to meet the needs of these constituencies.

Dependency

In project management, a dependency describes a relationship between two initiatives that must be executed in a particular order. If Initiative A is dependent on Initiative B, then Initiative B must be completed first. This situation frequently comes up in cross-functional teams, where development progress in one area is often dependent on the completion of certain stories or initiatives in another.

Continuous Delivery

In software product development, continuous delivery (CD) is the successful execution of continuous deployment. Whereas continuous deployment aims to reduce the amount of time between writing code and pushing it live, CD is the process by which these efforts successfully and sustainably reach the end-user. Applying this concept elsewhere, CD for product managers can offer immense benefits, like increasing opportunity for customer feedback.

Continuous Deployment

In software product development, continuous deployment refers to a strategy that aims to reduce the amount of time between writing code and pushing it live. Common practices under this agile-inspired strategy may include automated testing and automated releases.

Market Validation

Market validation is the process of presenting a concept for a product to its target market and learn from those prospective buyers whether or not the idea is worth pursuing. This process typically takes place early-on in the conception stage, before any significant investment has been made in developing the product.

MoSCoW Prioritization

MoSCoW prioritization, also known as the MoSCoW method or MoSCoW analysis, is a popular prioritization technique for managing requirements. The method is commonly used to help key stakeholders understand the significance of initiatives in a specific release. The acronym, MoSCoW, stands for 4 different categories of initiatives: must-haves, should-haves, could-haves, and will not have at this time. Sometimes, the "W" in MoSCoW is used to stand for "wish" instead of "will not have right now."

Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)

Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) is a measurement of revenue generation by month. This metric is often considered "the holy grail of all SaaS metrics," because it conveys an up-to-date measurement of the health of a company. For deeper insight, MRR can be broken into specific segments such as new business MRR, expansion MRR, and churned MRR.

Pair Programming

Pair programming is an agile software development practice in which two programmers team up at one workstation to maximize efficiency. With pair programming, one of the two programmers (the driver) writes the code while the other watches and reviews (the observer). The two programmers switch roles frequently.

Quality Function Deployment (QFD)

Quality Function Deployment, or QFD, is a model for product development and production popularized in Japan in the 1960's. The model aids in translating customer needs and expectations into technical requirements by listening to the voice of customer.

SMART Goal Setting

SMART framework provides the framework for setting clear, attainable goals in project management. The acronym stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound. A SMART goal incorporates all of these elements to bring greater clarity, focus, and motivation, all of which help increase the odds of successfully achieving the desired results.

C/C++

Some of the oldest programming languages, and still among the most popular. They run really fastbut are more difficult to write, so developers trying to get maximum performance (like those writinggraphics-heavy games, physics simulators, web servers, or operating systems) often use C and C++.

Product Designer

Someone responsible for the look and feel of a particular product, in the software industry design is focused around User Experience (UX). TERM IN ACTION: "Our Product Designer did a stellar job creating a unique feel and experience for when our customers use our products."

Backlog

Tasks - normally bugs that need fixing - that are important but not urgent, and have been listed to be completed at a non-specific date in the future when time and resources become available TERM IN ACTION: "Now that the product launch is taken care of, I'll take a look at my tasks in the backlog... Or maybe I'll just have a look tomorrow."

Technical Debt

Technical debt (also known as tech debt or code debt) describes what results when development teams take actions to expedite the delivery of a piece of functionality or a project which later needs to be refactored. In other words, it's the result of prioritizing speedy delivery over perfect code.

Backend

The "behind-the-scenes" part of an app or website that users don't see. The backend stores data,keeps track of users and their passwords, and prepares the webpages that are eventually shown to theuser. An analogy: in a restaurant, the cooks in the kitchen are the "backend," since they prepare thefood that customers enjoy, even if the customers never see them.

Year-over-year (YoY)

The change in a metric between a given point and a year earlier. This is useful when there are seasonalvariations in the metric. For instance, if educational software sales are always low in summer, it doesn'tmake sense to compare this June's sales to this March's. Instead, you'd compare to last June's.

Product Vision

The long term, big picture goal for a particular product, normally held by the Product Manager or CEO. All decisions will be referenced against this vision, which you should constantly be moving towards. TERM IN ACTION: "During the creation of our app, we came up with a product vision that everyone in urban areas would download our delivery smoothie app."

Engineering Backlog

The engineering backlog lists and prioritizes the stories, epics, and/or initiatives that are to be worked on by the engineering team for a given sprint. Typical items in an engineering backlog include stories, bug fixes, and other engineering-related tasks.

Jobs-To-Be-Done Framework

The jobs-to-be-done framework is an approach to developing products based on understanding both the customer's specific goal, or "job," and the thought processes that would lead that customer to "hire" a product to complete the job. When using this framework, a product team attempts to discover what its users are actually trying to accomplish or achieve when they buy a product or service.

Churn rate

The percent of users that a company loses over a particular timespan. For instance, if 1,000 peoplesigned up for Office 365 but only 750 renewed their subscription the next year, the churn rate wouldbe 25%.

Product Lifecycle

The product life cycle model breaks down the various stages of a product's evolution, from its debut to its retirement. Each phase comes with its own characteristics, demands, and challenges. All products travel through various stages during their existence, and the product life cycle breaks these down into specific phases with distinct characteristics. Although there are many versions and variants, the typical product life cycle consists of the following four periods: -Introduction -Growth -Maturity -Decline

Frontend

The user-facing part of a website or app. The frontend includes all the buttons, pages, and picturesthat users interact with. It takes information from the user, sends it to the backend, and updates what the user sees once the backend responds. As an analogy, the waiters in a restaurant are the "frontend."Waiters take diners' requests to the cooks (the backend) and serve diners the completed food.

Quality Assurance engineers (QA)

These engineers rigorously test software and hardware to hunt down bugs and ensure the software isrobust.

Epic

To describe the strategic goal of a product, you often need more than one feature or story. Rather, you need a group of features or stories to comprise this strategic goal. This is what Epic is in Agile. TERM IN ACTION:"The Epic for our Smoothie app describes how we plan to bring smoothie delivery to every household."

Total Addressable Market (TAM)

Total Addressable Market (TAM) refers to the maximum size of the opportunity for a particular product or solution. In other words, if every single person who could potentially find value in a product or solution purchased/started using it (i.e. 100% market share), how big would that market be?

TCP

Transmission Control Protocol: a protocol for breaking information into smaller chunks, so you cansend it over the internet more easily.

Usability Testing

Usability testing is a technique to evaluate how easy or difficult users find a company's product. It can also be used to gauge the intuitiveness or user-friendliness of other aspects of the customer experience, such as navigating a website or completing a trial download. This type of testing is most commonly used to evaluate the usability of the software.

Differentiation

We live in a competitive world and if your product is to succeed it must be distinct from other products in your market place. Similar to USP (Unique Selling Point), differentiation is the way in which your product is different from other similar products on the market. TERM IN ACTION: "Differentiation was key for our smoothie app because there are a lot of food apps in the world, but we wanted to be specialized and distinct by providing a service for one product."

Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF)

Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF) is a tool used in the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) to help teams prioritize a list of initiatives. A team calculates each initiative's score as the cost of delay divided by the job's size or duration. The team then prioritizes those items that receive the highest ratings.

Weighted Scoring

Weighted scoring prioritization uses numerical scoring to rank your strategic initiatives against benefit and cost categories. It is useful for product teams looking for objective prioritization techniques that factor in multiple layers of data.

Design Ops

What is design ops, and why should you make it a part of your product team's culture? This page will walk you through the basics of design ops and give you suggestions for incorporating it into your team. Design ops (sometimes written as the single-word DesignOps) refers to the practice of integrating the design team's workflow into the company's larger development context. In practical terms, this means the design ops role is responsible for planning and managing the design team's work and making sure that design is collaborating effectively with product and engineering throughout the development process.

MVP: Minimum Viable Product

What is the quickest, cheapest and most efficient way you can deliver on your value proposition and thus attain real-world feedback from your market? TERM IN ACTION: "Before we start developing a more complex model, we have to release our MVP."

Stakeholder Analysis

When it comes to any organizational project, all of the internal people and teams who the project will involve or affect are called its stakeholders. A stakeholder analysis is a process of identifying these people before the project begins grouping them according to their levels of participation, interest, and influence in the project and determining how best to involve and communicate each of these stakeholder groups throughout.

Conversion

Whenever a user does something that the business wants the precise action can depend on the company's goals. Conversions could include joining the mailing list, signing up for an account, or buying an item.

Voice of Customer (VOC)

Your customer's experience of your product and their needs and problems in their own words - an essential element of user research. TERM IN ACTION: "During User Research, we found through the VOC that they were experiencing serious stress when trying to finalize their order with our app. "

eXtreme Programming (XP)

eXtreme Programming (XP) is an agile framework that emphasizes both the broader philosophy of agile—to produce higher-quality software to please customers—as well as the more specific goal of making life better for the engineers developing it. The main characteristics of XP include dynamically changing software requirements using a small, collocated extended development team and leveraging technology that facilitates automated unit and functional tests.

Big data

Working with huge amounts of data to extract interesting insights. There's no specific definition ofhow big counts as "big", but if a dataset is too huge to fit on a single normal-sized computer, there'sa good chance that it counts as "big."

Product Requirements Document (PRD)

Defines the value and purpose of a product or feature. It is written by the product manager to communicate what you are building, who it is for, and how it benefits the end user.

Product Owner

Are you the person who defines your product story? Do you prioritize which tasks for your team to facilitate execution of tasks? If so, then you are probably a Product Owner. TERM IN ACTION: "While our team is incredible, our Product Owner does a masterful job in describing the story of our latest product."

Backlog

A backlog is a list of tasks required to support a larger strategic plan. In a product development context, it contains a prioritized list of items that the team has agreed to work on next. Typical items on a product backlog include user stories, changes to existing functionality, and bug fixes. One key component that gives a backlog meaning is that its items are ordered by priority. The items ranked highest on the list represent the most important or urgent items for the team to complete.

Bill of Materials (BOM)

A bill of materials (BOM) is a complete list of the materials needed to build a product. A BOM typically lists all the parts needed in their necessary quantities.

GTM: Go-to-Market Strategy

Want to deliver your amazing new product to users? You are going to need a go-to-market strategy or in other words, a plan based on inside and outside resources to present your unique value proposition to customers. TERM IN ACTION: "After reviewing all the data that we collected, plus doing thousands of interviews with target customers, we have finally developed our Go-to-Market Strategy so we can get our product into their hands ASAP."

USP: Unique Selling Proposition

What defines your product from competitors products? Your Unique Selling Proposition! Your USP is what separates you from the rest, while solidifying your product as distinctive. TERM IN ACTION: "Because of our USP, we were able to gain a hold of the majority of the market share because no one else was offering the solution that we created, a smoothie app."

MVE: Minimum Viable Experience

While Minimum Viable Products (MVP) focus on what you create, MVE focuses on the service you deliver to your customer - what's the quickest, leanest and most efficient way to deliver an experience that meets the needs of your customer for the purpose of gathering feedback and refining your offer. TERM IN ACTION: "Creating an MVE for our car rental app was critical as we wanted our users to be able to rent a car with as few steps as possible."

Kanban

Workflow with a task board showing what's upnext (to-do), in progress, ready to be tested/verified, and done. Tasks willmove from one column to the next, and you'll know how much work theteam can handle at once along with how many things it can verify at once. Continuous system instead of being organized into distinct time boxes.

A/B Test

An A/B test aims to compare the performance of two items or variations against one another. In product management, A/B tests are often used to identify the best-performing option. For example, two variations of a new user interface could be tested, and, in this case, the variation that receives the most user engagement would win the A/B test.

DevOps

An infinite loop of practices, philosophies, and tools that are used to increase the velocity of a product's life-cycle as it pertains to iterations, updates and fixes. TERM IN ACTION: "Our DevOps allow us to quickly make changes to the smoothie app, so all bugs, updates, and fixes can be delivered quickly."

Bubble Sort

Bubble sort is a basic algorithm for arranging a string of numbers or other elements in the correct order. The method works by examining each set of adjacent elements in the string, from left to right, switching their positions if they are out of order. The algorithm then repeats this process until it can run through the entire string and find no two elements that need to be swapped.

Personalization

Creating a customized experience with a product or service to delight individual users and customers. TERM IN ACTION: "Since customers were not happy with the generic model of the product, we personalized the in-app experience. This way they could have a unique, custom experience."

Hard Skills

Industry specific skills that can be directly acquired through training, such as coding or design. TERM IN ACTION: "While our PMs are really incredible at empathizing and communicating, they need to get more tech savvy and develop more hard skills."

OKR: Objectives & Key Results

Objectives and Key Results - a goal setting system associated with companies like Google that prioritizes focusing on clear and measurable/trackable results. TERM IN ACTION: "Before we launched our product, we had to lay out strict OKRs to know what exactly we were trying to accomplish."

Product Lifecycle

Products have a life just like any living thing. For products, their are generally 4 stages to their lifecycle: Introduction, Growth, Maturity, and Decline. While products don't have uniform lifecycles, you can expect nearly all products to go through these stages. TERM IN ACTION: "After the initial phase of introduction, we were lucky to see that our Product Lifecycle had a very long growth phase, quality maturity, and a slow decline."

R&D

Research & Development (R&D) is about taking things to the next level by improving your company's technology through the discovery of what is possible (research) and the creation of original solutions and tools (development). TERM IN ACTION: "With the time we spent on R&D, our research concluded that we needed to add new features that would provide solutions for our customers. We then began to develop these features and delight our customers."

Product Manager

Responsible for the development of products for an organization. Product managers own the business strategy behind a product (both physical and digital products), specify its functional requirements, and generally manage the launch of features. They coordinate work done by many other functions (like software engineers, data scientists, and product designers) and are ultimately responsible for the business success of the product.

Retrospective

Retrospective means to look back - in the product cycle, these typically take place after a launch so you can assess what went well and what didn't so you can improve next time around. TERM IN ACTION: "We knew that we had to take a retrospective look at our product after the latest launch proved to be less successful than anticipated."

Product-Market Fit

The highly desirable stage when everything clicks into place, your product is being happily taken up by your market at a price point that works for them and is profitable for you. At this stage you have your ducks in a row - double down and grow! TERM IN ACTION: "Once our company hit Product-Market fit, we knew it was time to celebrate! We were making money, and our customers were still demanding more."

Value Proposition

To attract customers it is imperative to offer a product, innovation, or service that will be useful in their lives. The promise of delivering value through one of these is known as the Value Proposition. TERM IN ACTION"The Value Proposition with our app was that our customers would never have to search for their smoothie fix ever again. We gave them value that they could not resist."

Fundamentally New Product

We all like to claim that what we create is new, but few products really are. A Fundamentally New Product is unique at a core level, providing functionality and/or results that have not been seen before in an industry. TERM IN ACTION: "All the competitors claim that they made a Fundamentally New Product, but the truth is we were the first company to create a smoothie app, which means WE created a fundamentally new product."

Acceptance Criteria

What does the client need, and under what circumstances will these needs be realized? In the agile development process, Acceptance Criteria gives you a constant, clear understanding of what the client/customer needs, so you can reference this against every iteration you deploy. TERM IN ACTION: "According to the acceptance criteria, the clients need a product that will automate their work on a daily basis, and send them hourly updates."

Design Concept

What is the broad, big picture idea behind what you are trying to design? This will be connected to the problem you are trying to solve, and the real-world customer journey TERM IN ACTION: "Our initial design concept was to create an interface that allows people to order up to 5 smoothies per week. Now, we are expanding our vision! We created the interface to allow for unlimited smoothie orders."

Use Case

When one needs to achieve a goal, generally there needs to be a list of actions that define the step-by-step process between the role and the system. Use Case represents this list of actions. TERM IN ACTION: "The Use Case that was lined out helped me achieve my target goal."

Design Thinking

Where Product Management and Design best practices converge - how can your product integrate into the real life of your end user, so it can effectively solve their problem under challenging conditions. TERM IN ACTION: "Design Thinking was a major component for the Smoothie App's UX and engineering team when constructing the concept."

Concept Review

Your concept is the initial idea for a new product, with some sense of how it is going to be implemented. A Concept Review is a discussion where you evaluate different or competing concepts, and decide which ones you're going to invest in and see through to completion. TERM IN ACTION: "We decided during the concept review that between a delivery smoothie app, a delivery milkshake app, or an all-in-one app, that we would go with the all-in-one option. Now both the smoothie and milkshake users can be happy!"

Waterfall

a linear project management approach, where stakeholder and customer requirements are gathered at the beginning of the project, and then a sequential project plan is created to accommodate those requirements. TERM IN ACTION: "Our product team used to create products following the waterfall method. However, we were unable to make quick iterations, and thus we abandoned it due to its rigidity."

MoSCoW

a prioritization technique to reach a common understanding with stakeholders on the importance they place on the delivery of each requirement. (Must have, Should have, Could have, and Won't have) TERM IN ACTION: "Our team needed to decide which tasks were of the utmost importance, and which could wait. To decide, we used the MoSCoW method."

Funnel

A metaphor for how the pool of potential customers shrinks before they make a particular"conversion," like buying a product. For instance, suppose an e-commerce website gets 1,000 visitors,but only 500 search for something, 100 put something in their cart, and 50 make a purchase.

AJAX

A method for one website to access information from another using an API. Uses JavaScript.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

A metric that measures customer satisfaction. Customers are asked to rate a product or service on ascale from 0 (they hate it) to 10 (they love it).

Business Intelligence (BI)

A method of compiling, analyzing and interpreting business data to make better-informed decisions. BI data is typically compiled through extensive research across a wide range of sources — including industry reports, customer feedback, actual usage data of the company's products, and competitive research.

Affinity Diagram

A method to organize large amounts of data in a bottom-up fashion by grouping related pieces of information to find patterns and themes. TERM IN ACTION: "Our affinity diagram made targeting for our product easier because it gave us a clearer sense of the different groups that were using our Product."

BI: Business Intelligence

A method of compiling, analyzing and interpreting business data to make better-informed decisions. BI data is typically compiled through extensive research across a wide range of sources — including industry reports, customer feedback, actual usage data of the company's products, and competitive research. TERM IN ACTION: "The BI team decided that based on the data they gathered, it was time to switch up how we delivered our product to the market."

Lean Software Development

(LSD) is an agile framework based on optimizing development time and resources, eliminating waste, and ultimately delivering only what the product needs. The Lean approach is also often referred to as the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) strategy, in which a team releases a bare-minimum version of its product to the market, learns from users what they like, don't like and want to be added, and then iterates based on this feedback.

Key Performance Indicator (KPI)

A metric that companies use for tracking success of products, teams, or employees. For instance,YouTube's KPIs could include number of users, number of videos, or number of video watches.

Method of Procedure

A method of procedure (MOP) is a step-by-step guideline for completing a project. Think of it as a recipe for accomplishing a business task. Businesses use MOPs to remove the guesswork and reduce human error. A company might write an MOP to guide employees through adding a server to the network, or for breaking ground on a construction project.

Python

A popular, easy-to-learn language that's common in introductory computer science courses. It's widelyused for data science and writing web servers.

Shipyard Engine

A shipyard engine describes a product team's process to keep its organization informed about the frequent updates the team ships.

XML

Another text-based data storage format. Like HTML, it stores and organizes data using tags, and likeJSON, it allows nesting.

The User Is Drunk

"The User is Drunk" is a product management and UX design concept that emphasizes designing products or websites so intuitive and straightforward that even someone under the influence of alcohol could use them. The term also describes the method of testing how direct a site or app is. How? By asking someone drunk to try using it.

Customer Journey Map

A customer journey map is a visual depiction of all steps a customer or prospect takes when interacting with your company with a specific goal in mind. This could include, for example, the path a visitor to your website takes to reach your trial-signup page. You might also develop a customer journey map to document the entire process a customer goes through to buy your product — from their first visit to your website, through signing an agreement with a sales rep.

Gantt Chart

A Gantt chart, or harmonogram, is a type of bar chart that graphically illustrates a schedule for planning, coordinating, and tracking specific tasks related to a single project. Henry Gantt, an American mechanical engineer, and social scientist designed the Gantt chart in the 1910s. Since then, it has been used on major infrastructure projects like the Hoover Dam and the U.S. Interstate Highway System.

Kanban Board

A Kanban board is a tool for visually arranging and tracking a team's workflow. This method is commonly used in project management. Kanban boards consist of columns representing various stages of progress, such as "not started" or "in review." Under these columns, the team adds cards describing discrete tasks and moves these cards to their appropriate columns, so everyone has a clear view of the team's progress.

Minimum Viable Feature (MVF)

A Minimum Viable Feature (or MVF) is similar to a minimum viable product but at the feature level. While a minimum viable product can help an organization understand whether the problem they seek to solve is one people need help with, an MVF can help an organization determine whether the proposed solution is the right one.

Platform Product Manager

A Platform Product Manager (PM), is one of the most challenging roles in product management. They are responsible for prioritizing and supporting the work of multiple consumer-facing products and providing a cohesive vision across the organization. However, platform PMs can still have a significant impact across product lines.

Product Development Manager

A Product Development Manager (PDM)—often a software engineer, QA tester, or UX designer—is responsible for identifying new opportunities for developing a new marketable product from concept to distribution. They are also responsible for improving an existing product to meet customers' needs better and invigorate a current market. A PDM accomplishes this by accomplishing the following: -Conducting market research -Analyzing industry trends and developments -Working with existing customers to understand their needs better

SWOT Analysis

A SWOT analysis is a planning framework that a business can use to identify a strategic endeavor's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. The term SWOT is an acronym for these four factors. In a SWOT analysis, a project's (or product's) strengths and weaknesses are internal factors. Strengths might include the company's domain expertise or intellectual property. Weaknesses might include missing skillsets or a lack of budget. Opportunities and threats, by contrast, are external and refer to competition, the market, or changing trends that could affect the company.

Product Description Sheet

A brief summary of the function of your product and its target audience, normally created at the planning stage as a tool for team members and potential investors TERM IN ACTION: "The investors could have a clearer understanding of who our target audience is, plus what our product does and the price we'll sell it for if we presented to them our Product Description Sheet."

Burndown Chart

A burndown chart is a visual display of work completed and remaining in a project, sprint, or iteration. In most cases the x-axis of the chart represents time, while the y-axis represents work either completed or remaining.

Business Model Canvas

A business model canvas provides a high-level, comprehensive view of the various strategic details required to successfully bring a product to market. The typical use case for this tool is to outline the fundamental building blocks of a business, but it can be used effectively for individual products as well. The exact ingredients may vary, but these are some of the typical components included: -Customer segments—Who is going to use this product? -Product value propositions—What is this going to do for the customer to make their life/job better? -Revenue streams—How will the company make money from this product? -Channels—How will the product be sold or distributed? -Customer relationships—What is the success and support strategy for new customers? -Key partners—What other companies or individuals are part of the development and go-to-market strategy? -Key activities—What must happen internally to release this product? -Key resources—What people, materials and budget are required to pull this off? -Cost structure—How much will it cost to develop, manufacture, distribute, and support the product?

Call-to-action (CTA)

A button or link that prompts visitors to take some action, like "Join our mailing list" or "Register forour conference."

Buyer Persona

A buyer persona is often created by product teams to describe the broad cohort of individuals who have a say in the purchasing process. This can include a number of influencers and decision makers who might not even be using the product upon purchasing. Aside from being a larger demographic, this persona will likely differ from the user persona in regards to their goals and needs.

Chief Product Officer

A chief product officer (CPO) is a corporate title referring to an executive who leads the entire product organization. Alternatively, the CPO is known as VP of product or head of product. A CPO is responsible for the strategic product direction. Usually, it includes product vision, product innovation, product design, product development, project management, and product marketing. In many tech companies, this position also provides distribution, manufacturing, and procurement.

Hackathon

A coding competition where developers team up to build cool, creative software in short sprints,usually from 12 to 72 hours. Hackathons often feature high-tech prizes, tech company recruiters, freeswag like t-shirts and stickers, and late-night food.

Cost-Per-Click (CPC)

A common type of internet ad, such as the ones seen on Google, that charge advertisers a small feeevery time someone clicks on their ads. Also known as Pay-Per-Click (PPC).

Cross-Functional Team

A cross-functional team refers to a group which contains expertise or representation from various "functional" departments. For example, an agile cross-functional team may consist of a product manager, product owner, scrum master, engineers, QA, and design.

Standup

A daily standup is a quick session where each member of the team shares what they accomplished yesterday, what they'll try to accomplish today, and what is blocking work from progressing. Standups are a critical element of the agile development framework, as they promote frequent and high-touch team communication.

Sprint

A defined timeframe during which a new feature, product or piece of software needs to be completed and made ready for review by a dedicated team, popular within Agile development. TERM IN ACTION: "The product team set up a sprint in order to complete the latest feature of our smoothie app."

Customer Journey Map

A diagram that shows visually the stages a customer goes through when using your product, from the trigger, need or pain point that motivates them to begin using your product, through the actual use all the way through to resolution and the achievement of their goal. TERM IN ACTION: "When we reviewed the customer journey map, we saw that our customers were leaving our smoothie app at the checkout stage."

TLD

A domain name ending, such as .com, .org, or .gov. Each country has its own TLD, called a "ccTLD":France has .fr, Mexico has .mx, India has .in, and so on.

Feature-Less Roadmap

A feature-less roadmap is a roadmap designed to function as a strategic blueprint. Feature-less roadmaps enable product managers to deliver a product that both solves customer problems and supports the broader goals of the company.

Persona or User Persona

A fictitious representation of your typical user or customer - a useful tool for getting a clearer image of your end user so you can make more targeted and empathetic decisions. TERM IN ACTION: "After creating our User Persona, we realized that we needed to make some alterations to our product after we had a clearer image of what our users are seeking through our product."

Ruby on Rails

A framework for building web apps using Ruby. Airbnb, Twitch, and Square are all built with Rubyon Rails. Also known as RoR or Rails.

Six Thinking Hats

A framework for thinking and discussion developed by Edward de Bono, it structures thought and conversion around six categories: Managing, Information, Emotions, Discernment, Optimistic response and Creativity. TERM IN ACTION: "As a team, we were not communicating well, so we switched up our methods and began using the framework of the Six Thinking Hats."

Hadoop

A free "big data" software package for storing and analyzing huge amounts of data — we're talkingterabytes and petabytes.

Linux

A free, open-source family of operating systems

Implicit Requirement

A function or need your product must serve that is not explicitly or directly stated by your client but is apparent through context or circumstance. TERM IN ACTION: "It was clear that moving the call to action button was an implicit requirement considering no users knew how to upgrade."

Database

A giant table used to store information like a super powered Excel file. For instance, Facebook might store information about all its users in a database, with a separate row for each user and columns for name, birthday, hometown, etc.

Go-to-Market Strategy

A go-to-market strategy is a tactical plan detailing how a company plans to execute a successful product release and promotion, and ultimately its sale to customers. Common elements of a product's go-to-market strategy include: -Pricing strategy -Sales tactics and channels -A planned customer journey map -Marketing tactics and campaigns -Budget for product launch and marketing -Plans for training the sales and customer support teams

Cross-Functional Team

A group of people who have complimentary - but varying - skill sets that work together to complete a product or project. TERM IN ACTION: "Gary from Marketing, Gaby from BI, Shoshanna the engineer, and Billiam from platform are on the cross-functional team that is building the smoothie app."

C# (C-Sharp)

A language built by Microsoft, often used to write desktop apps. Similar to Java.

Go

A language designed by Google, often used to build web servers.

Ruby

A language often used for building web apps through the popular web-server software Ruby on Rails.

PHP

A language used to write web servers. Facebook is written using a custom "dialect" of PHP.

Feature Audit

A map laying out all the features that you want to develop so you can check them against your customer/client's requirements and make sure you are delivering the results that you need to TERM IN ACTION: "Because the customers had a new set of demands, we did a feature audit to see what needed to be met to create the necessary solutions."

Market Requirements Document (MRD)

A market requirements document, or an MRD, is a strategic document written by a product manager or product marketing manager to help define the market's requirements or demand for a specific product. An MRD typically contains information on the product's vision, the competitive landscape, business analysis, and revenue opportunity, as well as a list of features or at least high-level feature categories.

A/B Test

A method to experiment two versions of a single variable to gauge a subject's response to each variant. TERM IN ACTION: "Let's do an A/B test to see which version of the landing page our users prefer!"

Flat design

A minimalistic design trend, where you remove unnecessary shiny colors, shadows, animations, andother details, reducing the app to simple colors, geometric shapes, and grids. A few examples areMicrosoft's Metro UI (the tiled design used in Windows 8 and 10) and Apple's flattening of iOS sinceversion 7.

Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

A minimum viable product, or MVP, is a product with enough features to attract early-adopter customers and validate a product idea early in the product development cycle. In industries such as software, the MVP can help the product team receive user feedback as quickly as possible to iterate and improve the product.

Incremental Product

A model where each successful version transcends the previous version without necessarily replacing it - the new version improves on what came before, but the previous version is still functional. TERM IN ACTION: "Our latest app is the culmination of many rounds of incremental product development."

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

A net promoter score is a method of using a single survey question to gauge customer satisfaction with a product. Businesses can send out this question— "On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend [our product or company]?"—at various stages of the customer's journey.

Growth Product Management

A niche Product Management role focused on optimizing for user acquisition as your main KPI. TERM IN ACTION: "There was a significant concern that not enough users were downloading our app, so we shifted focus to Growth Product Management."

Technical Product Manager

A niche Product Management role where the PM is expected to have a high level of technical proficiency and may be more involved in the day to day coding and software engineering activities than a standard Product Manager. TERM IN ACTION: "Before we launched our latest feature, we encountered a bug in the checkout cart. Our Technical Product Manager was able to fix this bug with his extensive knowledge of coding."

Lean Development

A philosophy or strategy of software development that prioritizes the minimization of waste and the most efficient application of resources. TERM IN ACTION: "While creating our latest products, we wanted to trim the fat of the development process, so we switched over to Lean Development."

SHA

A popular cryptography algorithm used for encoding and decoding secure communications. There are multiple versions of SHA as of the time of writing, the most modern one is SHA-3.

JSON

A popular data storage format often used by web apps. It's more free-form than CSV, allowing dataobjects that are nested inside other objects. For instance, a "person" object could contain "name" and"age" data, as well as a "pet" object (which has its own "name" and "age.")

Bootstrap

A popular toolkit for designing websites, Bootstrap is basically a giant CSS file that contains nicely-designed layouts, fonts, and colors for buttons, headings, and other pieces of webpages. Manywebsites use Bootstrap as a starting point for their styling it's a very powerful website template.

Beta

A preliminary version of software, often released to testers to get user feedback before the finalproduct launches.

Cost of Delay (CoD)

A prioritization framework that helps a business quantify the economic value of completing a project sooner as opposed to later. Product teams use this approach to calculate and compare the ongoing monetary costs that would result from delaying the completion of each initiative on the team's backlog.Here's a simplified version of how to calculate the cost of delay: 1. Estimate the revenue per unit of time (say, monthly) that a new project will generate. 2. Estimate the amount of time your team will need to complete the project. 3. Divide the monthly-profit number by the project's estimated time duration. This number tells you how much money each month it will cost your organization to delay the delivery of the finished project.

Disciplined Agile (DA)

A process decision framework that puts individuals first and offers only lightweight guidance to help teams optimize their processes according to the unique needs of each specific project. As a people-first agile framework, DA is in some ways similar to the Crystal method. In fact, DA is designed to be a hybrid approach combining elements of XP, Scrum, Kanban, and other methodologies.

Product Discovery

A process undertaken at an early stage of Product Development to ensure that your product meets the needs of its potential users, has a market, and creates unique and desirable value. TERM IN ACTION: "During Product Discovery, we could safely say that our product has a market, meets the needs of a customer, and adds value to their lives. How could a smoothie app not do that?"

Product Backlog

A product backlog lists and prioritizes the task-level details required to execute on the strategic plan set forth in the roadmap. The backlog should communicate what's next on the development team's to-do list as they execute on the roadmap's big-picture vision. Typical items in a product backlog include user stories, bug fixes, and other tasks. The backlog is a translation of how your team will deliver the vision outlined on an agile roadmap. In many ways, it is a giant to-do list for your development team.

Product Brief

A product brief, or product spec, defines a product's goals, attributes, and overall direction. It outlines requirements and key product information that a product team needs to build a new feature or product. A product brief is an effective tool for product development. It requires few resources to create one, but it can deliver enormous benefits. For some product teams, a product brief is a place to flesh out ideas. There's no standard length but you should use the format and length that works best for your team and product.

Product Designer

A product designer is responsible for the user experience of a product, usually taking direction on the business goals and objectives from product management. Although typically associated with the visual/tactile aspects of a product, product designers can sometimes also play a role in the information architecture and system design of a product as well.

Product Disruptor

A product disruptor is an innovation that represents a change in a product's direction, business model, or value proposition. The term is borrowed from industry disruptor. That concept describes an innovation (Uber, for example) that creates a new industry by displacing an existing one (taxicabs). In a similar way, a product disruptor is a shift in the direction of the product so significantly that it alters a product in fundamental ways.

Feature Kickoff

A product feature kickoff is a meeting in which a product manager and relevant stakeholders set plans, goals, and responsibilities for the team's work on a new feature. For most organizations, the product feature kickoff is the event that marks the company's official start date for the feature's development. It also sends an important signal to the team: the company has prioritized building this feature and is ready to begin right away.

Product Launch

A product launch refers to a business's planned and coordinated effort to debut a new product to the market and make that product generally available for purchase. A product launch serves many purposes for an organization— giving customers the chance to buy the new product is only one of them. It also helps an organization build anticipation for the product, gather valuable feedback from early users, and create momentum and industry recognition for the company.

Product Management Audit

A product management audit is a complete, objective review of a company's product strategy and product management processes. Each aspect of the product strategy and process is numerically rated to identify areas of weakness that would benefit from improvement, as well as any areas that are completely lacking. By using a numerical rating instead of a binary one, progress and improvement over time can be tracked and measured.

Product Manager

A product manager drives the development of products and is ultimately responsible for the success of those products. Product managers are information gatherers, defining the strategic direction of the product by focusing on their business's strategic goals, the market's demands and opportunities, and the technological and financial resources available to them to make the product a reality. Read more about everything you need to know about a product manager's job.

Product Marketing Manager

A product marketing manager's (PMM) primary responsibility is to communicate the product's value to the market. A PMM's responsibilities could include training the sales force on how to sell the product, creating marketing materials that communicate product features, and developing the marketing tools and campaigns to attract new prospects and customers.

Product Requirements Document (PRD)

A product requirements document (PRD) is an artifact used in the product development process to communicate what capabilities must be included in a product release to the development and testing teams. This document is typically used more in waterfall environments where product definition, design, and delivery happen sequentially, but may be used in an agile setting as well. The PRD will contain everything that must be included in a release to be considered complete, serving as a guide for subsequent documents in the release process. While PRDs may hint at a potential implementation to illustrate a use case, they may not dictate a specific implementation.

Product Stack

A product stack refers to the apps, technologies, and other resources product managers use to bring their products to market. The term is borrowed from the development community, which often describes its team's toolkits as their development stack or tech stack.

Product Strategy

A product strategy is a high-level plan describing what a business hopes to accomplish with its product, and how it plans to do so. This strategy should answer key questions such as who the product will serve (personas), how it will benefit those personas, and what are the company's goals for the product throughout its lifecycle.

Intuitive

A product that is intuitive to use is one that feels easy smooth and natural because it fits neatly into our existing habits and mental models. TERM IN ACTION: "The intuitive interface of LinkedIn's app has made it simple for professionals to connect online."

Product Vision

A product vision, or product vision statement, describes the overarching long-term mission of your product. Vision statements are aspirational and communicate concisely where the product hopes to go and what it hopes to achieve in the long term. The statement should serve as a guide and reminder to all stakeholders involved in a product's development (the product team, development, the executive staff, marketing, etc.) about the shared objective they're trying to achieve with this product.

Product

A purchasable, downloadable, or freely attainable entity - be it something physical, downloadable, or accessible online - that delivers value. TERM IN ACTION: "We just released our first product to the market. A smoothie delivery app that is free to download."

Data Product Manager

A relatively new, specialized Product Management role focused on the use, management and application of data and machine learning, more typically found in large, analytically oriented customers, often in the financial sector. TERM IN ACTION: "We just recruited a new Data Product Manager to run the Machine Learning side of our smoothie app."

Release Demo

A release demo is typically given by agile teams at the end of a sprint. These demos are used to share the work that's been completed during a given sprint. Depending on the organization, release demos may include a small group of selected stakeholders or even the entire organization.

Release Plan

A release plan is a tactical document designed to capture and track the features planned for an upcoming release. A release plan usually spans only a few months and is typically an internal working document for product and development teams. Release plans can be created using a number of solutions such as roadmapping software or a business model canvas.

Retrospective

A retrospective is a meeting held after a product ships to discuss what happened during the product development and release process, with the goal of improving things in the future based on those learnings and conversations.

Library

A reusable chunk of code that one developer publishes online for other developers to use. For instance, D3 is a famous library that lets JavaScript developers make interactive graphs, charts, and maps with just a few lines of code. Also known as package or module. alternatives to Windows and macOS. Many of the world's biggest supercomputers, as well as most web servers, run Linux. Android is built on Linux,too.

Roadmap

A roadmap is a high-level strategic document that is created and maintained to communicate the strategic vision and objectives of a product. Roadmaps are used by managers in a number of fields, such as product, IT, and marketing.

Scrum Master

A scrum master is a facilitator for an agile team working under the scrum methodology. The scrum master serves as a point person responsible for understanding the big development picture of each sprint. They are responsible for delegating tasks appropriately and ensuring the team is working on the right tasks at the right time. They also want to ensure the team is fully deployed and not idle. The role of scrum master often involves working closely with the product owner to translate epics, stories, and other items on the sprint list into actionable tasks for developers.

Wireframe

A simple way to draw the "skeleton" of an app or website, like how you might make an outlinebefore writing an essay. Wireframes are made of just lines on paper: buttons and images becomeboxes, sidebars become rectangles, text becomes squiggly lines, and so on. Wireframes help figure outwhere page elements should go before anything gets coded.

Product Marketing Manager (PMM)

A slightly more marketing-focused version of Product Managers, they're more focused on launchingand marketing products instead of building them.

Landing page

A small webpage targeted at a particular demographic it'll often offer visitors something useful like an e-book or mailing list in exchange for their contact information. In marketing-speak, it's a targeted way to acquire "leads."

Agile

A software development paradigm that emphasizes short, alternating bursts of writing software andgetting feedback from users. For example, instead of taking months or years to release one huge finalproduct, an Agile team would prioritize quickly releasing a "minimum viable product," or a simpleprototype. Then the team would get feedback from users to "iterate on" and improve the prototype,repeating this process many times until it is happy with the result.

FDD: Feature-Driven Development

A software development process popular within the Agile model that emphasizes and creates small chunks of client-focused value, i.e features. TERM IN ACTION: "Our team shifted focus to FDD to find out which unique features delighted our customers the most."

Sprint Backlog

A sprint backlog is the set of items that a cross-functional product team selects from its product backlog to work on during the upcoming sprint. Typically the team will agree on these items during its sprint planning session. In fact, the sprint backlog represents the primary output of sprint planning.

Stakeholder

A stakeholder is someone who has a vested interest in your product - this could be your clients, customers, investors or senior management. Stake holder management involves balancing the often conflicting demands of these people while also meeting their needs within the bounds of possibility. TERM IN ACTION: "Since the stakeholders had a major say in the direction of the product, we had to deliver them daily reports."

Story Point

A story point is a unit of measurement used by development teams to estimate the amount of effort required to execute an item in the backlog. Since not all developers work at the same pace, this measurement system helps create a standardized language that is universally understood across the team.

Technical Product Manager

A technical product manager (PM) is a product manager with a strong technical background that is typically focused on the more technical aspects of the product. A technical PM works more closely with the engineering team than the business, sales and marketing teams of the organization.

Minification

A technique that developers use to compress their code files by removing any unnecessary bits oftext. Also known as uglification or compression.

Terminal

A text-based interface available on computers developers use the terminal to build software. Even if you're not writing code, the terminal is handy for complex customization, and a few apps can only be run from the terminal, not from the point-and-click interface we're used to. Also known as command line, shell, or Bash.

Theme

A theme in product management is a high-level objective for the product, usually built on a related set of features or stories. Themes are broad strategic goals for the product, which can be easily understood by various constituencies in plain language. For example, if your product is an enterprise software application in the healthcare space, a theme for a future release might be to "ensure the product complies with federal regulations such as HIPAA."

Kano Model

A theory for product development and customer satisfaction developed in the 1980s by Professor Noriaki Kano, which classifies customer preferences into three categories Basic Features, Performance Features (Satisfiers), and Excitement Features (Delighters).

Top-Down Product Strategy

A top-down product strategy is one where high-level objectives and a long-term vision are defined first and then used to inform what follows. In top-down planning, the roadmap conveys the strategy but is not built and prioritized until goals and the vision are in place.

Cost-Per-Mille (CPM)

A type of internet ad. Advertisers pay a flat fee each time 1000 people view the ad on a website, suchas in Google search results. Also known as Pay-Per-Impression (PPI).

Unique Selling Proposition

A unique selling proposition (USP) is a clear and succinct description of how your product is both different from and better than those of your competitors. To qualify as an effective unique selling proposition, this statement must address two criteria: -It should explain what sets your product apart from the rest -It should explain why this unique aspect makes your product the best choice for users.

Use Case

A use case is a hypothetical (but plausible) scenario showing how a product's user might interact with the product to achieve a specific goal. Product managers often employ use cases to explain how and why customers will use various parts of a product. They are often told through easy-to-digest hypothetical stories.

JTBD: Jobs-To-Be-Done

A useful way of looking at the Value Proposition of a product is to imagine that the customer has a series of "jobs" to be performed in their lives, and that your product can help by performing one or more of those jobs for them. TERM IN ACTION: "When developing the latest money transfer app, the PMs had to look at the JTBD of people who needed to send money quickly and efficiently."

User Interface

A user interface, or UI, is any part of a product or system which the end user interacts with. Users work within a user interface, or UI, to control or operate the product or machine they are using.

User Persona

A user persona is a composite biography (or series of biographies) drafted based on market research and experience to describe the relevant characteristics, needs, and goals of the people who will be using a product.

User Story

A user story is a small, self-contained unit of development work designed to accomplish a specific goal within a product. A user story is usually written from the user's perspective and follows the format: "As [a user persona], I want [to perform this action] so that [I can accomplish this goal]."

Value Proposition

A value proposition is a statement that identifies measurable benefits prospective customers can expect when buying a product or service. When done well, it serves as a competitive differentiator. It motivates potential customers to choose a product or service over others in the marketplace, thus giving organizations a powerful competitive advantage.

Mind Map

A visual tool whereby ideas, plans and concepts are arranged around a broad central idea, which each "branch" leading to off to progressively more detailed or specific thoughts. TERM IN ACTION: "We used Mind Mapping to develop the external features of the product so we could have a more complete vision."

Docker

A way for developers to package up everything an app needs to run in a "container," which anyone can run on any supported machine. It's convenient because you don't have to worry about having the right computer configuration the same container will run the exact same way everywhere. Docker is much more efficient than the alternative, which is to boot up a whole new operating system to run each app.

NoSQL

A way of constructing databases, an alternative to (you guessed it) SQL. NoSQL emphasizes morefree-form interaction with data rather than just working with rows and columns, which SQL does.

CSS

A web development language that works with HTML, used to make websites look pretty. CSS letsyou change a webpage's colors, fonts, background, and so on. It also lets you specify where the variousbuttons, headers, images, etc. on a webpage should go.

GitHub

A website that hosts millions of open-source software projects. Anyone can see and build on others'code here. Code on GitHub is organized into repositories, or "repos." People can "fork" these reposto make their own versions of the code, and developers can suggest changes to repos using "pullrequests."

Wireframe

A wireframe is a visual prototype that displays the layout of a web page or application. It is a rough sketch of how pieces of content work together on a screen. Wireframes often consist of high level skeletal depictions that use boxes with Xs in them to show where images are and squiggly lines to represent text.

End-to-End

Refers to every stage of the roadmap, journey or process - from start to finish. TERM IN ACTION: "The team has covered the roadmap end-to-end, and they are now ready to launch the product."

AARRR Framework

AARRR framework is an acronym for a set of five user-behavior metrics that businesses should be tracking: 1. Acquisition. (How are people discovering our product or company?) 2. Activation. (Are these people taking the actions we want them to?) 3. Retention. (Are our activated users continuing to engage with the product?) 4. Referral. (Do users like the product enough to tell others about it?) 5. Revenue. (Are our personas willing to pay for this product?)

Adaptive Software Development (ASD)

Adaptive Software Development (ASD) is a direct outgrowth of an earlier agile framework, Rapid Application Development (RAD). It aims to enable teams to quickly and effectively adapt to changing requirements or market needs by evolving their products with lightweight planning and continuous learning. The ASD approach encourages teams to develop according to a three-phase process: speculate, collaborate, learn.

Affinity Grouping

Affinity grouping can be used as a collaborative prioritization activity. It works by having your group of participants brainstorm ideas and opportunities on Post-It Notes. The team then works to put the sticky notes into groups of similar items. Once the groups are created, the team votes on the groups to rank them.

Mockup

After wireframing and prototyping, designers make mockups, which are high-quality drawings thatspecify exactly which fonts, colors, pictures, spacing, etc. the developers making the app should use.Mockups help designers ensure every detail is perfect and get feedback before the app is actuallycoded. As UXPin says, "Wireframes are the skeleton. Prototypes demonstrate the behavior. Mockupsare the skin."

Agile Values

Agile Values refers to the set of 4 values outlined by the Agile Alliance in The Agile Manifesto. This set of values encourages putting people before processes, getting software out the door fast, collaborating with customers, and adjusting plans as needed. -Individuals and interactions over processes and tools -Working software over comprehensive documentation -Customer collaboration over contract negotiation -Responding to change over following a plan

Fibonacci Agile Estimation

Agile estimation refers to a way of quantifying the effort needed to complete a development task. Many agile teams use story points as the unit to score their tasks. The higher the number of points, the more effort the team believes the task will take. The Fibonacci sequence is one popular scoring scale for estimating agile story points. In this sequence, each number is the sum of the previous two in the series. The Fibonacci sequence goes as follows: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89... and so on.

Agile

Agile is an iterative product-development methodology in which teams work in brief, incremental "sprints," and then regroup frequently to review the work and make changes. The agile methodology encourages frequent feedback and the ability to switch focus and priority quickly. This is in contrast to the more traditional, sequence-based, waterfall methodology, where product managers set long-term plans in discrete phases for development teams to execute.

Agile

Agile is an iterative product-development methodology in which teams work in brief, incremental "sprints," and then regroup frequently to review the work and make changes. The agile methodology encourages frequent feedback and the ability to switch focus and priority quickly. This is in contrast to the more traditional, sequence-based, waterfall methodology, where product managers set long-term plans in discrete phases for development teams to execute. TERM IN ACTION: "We use agile because our products require constant updates and consistent feedback on iterations."

Stage-Gate

Also known as "phase-gate" or "waterfall," this is a product development process or methodology where your work is divided into separate stages, each defined by their own criteria and decision points. TERM IN ACTION: "Processes were moving too slow for us when we used Stage-Gate, so we switched to an agile method."

Opportunity Solution Tree

An Opportunity Solution Tree (OST) is a visual aid that helps enable the product discovery process through the non-linear organization of ideation flows, experimentation, and identification of gaps. Simply put, an OST is a visual plan for how you will then reach a clear desired outcome.

Action Priority Matrix

An action priority matrix is a diagram that helps people determine which tasks to focus on, and in which order. You create this matrix using two components. First, draw a graph that measures effort along the x-axis and impact along the y-axis. Next, add four boxes to the graph, two stacked on top of the others. With the finished diagram, you can plot all of your initiatives to see if they are high impact and low effort, high impact and high effort, low impact and low effort, or high impact and low effort.

Ship

An aquatic searfaring vessel... just kidding. In Product Management, "ship" is a verb - it means to complete and successfully deliver your product, ideally within budget and on time! TERM IN ACTION: "One of the biggest challenges we faced with our newest hardware product was when we had to ship it. Yet we managed to get it into all retailers, and even did it under budget!"

Feature

An aspect of your product that delivers value by meeting a requirement of your customer - such as performing a function that helps solve your client's problem or gets them closer to achieving the desired result. TERM IN ACTION: "Customers were demanding that the app contained delivery tracking, so we added that feature."

Scrum

An offshoot of the Agile method, where software development teams release new features every fewweeks, organizing their work into "sprints." They often have daily 15-minute "stand-up" meetings soeveryone knows what everyone else is doing and so vital information gets shared across the wholeteam.

API

Application Programming Interface: A way for one app to get information from another app, or makeanother app do something. For instance, Twitter has an API that lets another app post Tweets onsomeone's behalf, and ESPN has an API that lets you grab the latest sports scores.

Backlog Grooming

Backlog grooming, also referred to as backlog refinement or story time, is a recurring event for agile product development teams. The primary purpose of a backlog grooming session is to ensure the next few sprints worth of user stories in the product backlog are prepared for sprint planning. Regular backlog grooming sessions also help ensure the right stories are prioritized and that the product backlog does not become a black hole. Synonyms: Backlog Refinement, Story Time

B2B

Business-to-business: companies that normally sell to other businesses instead of to average peoplelike you or us. Some famous B2B tech companies are IBM, which sells cloud computing services tobusinesses, and Accenture, which provides technical consulting.

B2C

Business-to-consumer: companies that sell to consumers in other words, you could buy their stuff from stores or websites. For instance, Fitbit, Nike, and Ford are B2C. Some companies could be both B2B and B2C. For instance, Coca-Cola sells soda to shoppers but also to universities, hotels, and restaurants. 21 And Microsoft sells Office to both consumers and large businesses.

Buy-a-Feature

Buy-a-Feature is one of many prioritization frameworks product managers can use. It's commonly used to help organizations identify the features that customers and key stakeholders value the most. Product managers can leverage Buy-a-Feature to directly engage stakeholders and even customers to help shape their products and to prioritize features based on their expected value return. Buy-a-Feature is an approach to prioritizing a product's development in which the product team works directly with a group of customers or other stakeholders to learn what features or enhancements to the product those participants would value the most.

Customer Development

Customer development is the portion of the Lean Startup methodology aimed at understanding the problem. This requires first fully vetting the opportunity and validating that the proposed solution will indeed meet customer needs and demand. Customer development runs counter to typical product development processes that begin with the ideal solution in mind and dive right into execution.

Customer Empathy

Customer empathy is understanding the underlying needs and feelings of customers. It goes beyond recognizing and addressing their tactical requirements and puts things into further context by viewing things from their perspective. Product managers utilize customer empathy to create products that not only help users accomplish a task but also fit into their overall workflow and lifestyle.

Change Management

Change management is a systematic approach to supporting employees and teams as an organization transitions to new processes, tools, or initiatives. Making even a small change in an organization can lead to anxiety, fear, and frustration among the affected staff if not rolled out properly. A well-thought-out change management process can help a company make needed adjustments smoothly and successfully.

Churn

Churn is a measurement of the percentage of accounts that cancel or choose not to renew their subscriptions. A high churn rate can negatively impact Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) and can also indicate dissatisfaction with a product or service. Churn is the measure of how many customers stop using a product. This can be measured based on actual usage or failure to renew (when the product is sold using a subscription model). Often evaluated for a specific period of time, there can be a monthly, quarterly, or annual churn rate.

CSV

Comma-separated values: a way to store data in lightweight tables, similar to an Excel file but muchsimpler. These files have the ".csv" ending.

Continuous Integration

Continuous integration or CI, refers to an engineering practice that is said to help automate certain pieces of work and identify bugs early in the process. Engineers practicing continuous integration merge their code to a shared repository several times each day. That code is then passed through several automated tests to help identify any errors.

Crystal Agile Framework

Crystal is an agile framework focusing on individuals and their interactions, as opposed to processes and tools. The Crystal agile framework is built on two core beliefs: -Teams can find ways on their own to improve and optimize their workflows -Every project is unique and always changing, which is why that project's team is best suited to determine how it will tackle the work

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

Customer Acquisition Cost, or CAC, measures how much an organization spends to acquire new customers. CAC - an important business metric - is the total cost of sales and marketing efforts, as well as property or equipment, needed to convince a customer to buy a product or service.

Documentation

Refers to information either embedded into code or published separately that describes what the code is, how it works, and other important pieces of information about it.

Cannibalization

In product management, cannibalization is when two different products from the same company compete with one other. Product managers are often responsible for an entire line or suite of products so that cannibalization can be kept to a minimum, or avoided altogether.

Data scientist

Data scientists analyze the company's data (on customers, sales, usage, etc.) to inform the company'sbusiness strategy and products.

Product Owner

Definition 1: A tactical member of the product development team. They attend daily Scrum meetings and prioritize the backlog. They are expected to ensure the developers are working efficiently and on the right items. Definition 2: A strategic role responsible for representing the interests of the customer for the development team. Their role is to ensure that there is always a user advocate involved in development meetings. Definition 3: A product manager assigned to oversee sprints. They are expected to be accessible to the development team if they need help or have questions.

Digital Transformation

Digital transformation is the act of revolutionizing business processes to take advantage of digital technologies, with the goal of making them more efficient, accessible, and scalable.

Disruptive Innovation

Disruptive innovation is a term coined by Clayton M. Christensen to describe any type of innovation that creates a new industry, market, or business model which eventually "disrupts" an existing one.

Dual-Track Agile

Dual-track agile is a type of agile development in which the cross-functional product team breaks its daily development work into two tracks: discovery and delivery. The discovery track focuses on quickly generating validated product ideas for the backlog, and the delivery track focuses on turning those ideas into software ready for the market.

Enterprise Architecture Planning

Enterprise architecture is a strategic and comprehensive blueprint for how IT infrastructure will be used across an organization to help meet that organization's goals. According to the professional association Enterprise Architecture Center of Excellence (EACOE), this blueprint can help a business establish a clear framework for the technology solutions, policies, and standards the company will use to align IT initiatives with its business objectives. The EACOE actually defines enterprise architecture from two related perspectives: an IT standpoint and a business standpoint

Persona

Example people that designers create to summarize the types of users in their market. Personas havenames, backstories, and personalities. For example, LinkedIn's personas could be Sanjana theStudent, Ricky the Recruiter, or Jackie the Job-Hunter.

Scrum

Framework that emphasizes teamwork, accountability and iterative progress toward a well-defined goal. The framework begins with a simple premise: Start with what can be seen or known. After that, track the progress and tweak as necessary. The three pillars of Scrum are transparency, inspection and adaptation. TERM IN ACTION: "Since switching over to Scrum, our engineers have been much more productive now that they are largely working autonomously."

GIST Planning

GIST stands for Goals, Ideas, Step-Projects, and Tasks. GIST planning is a lightweight approach to product planning, with the goal of reducing management overhead, increasing velocity, and producing products that better meet the needs of the market. The intended purpose of GIST is to only build products and solutions with the objectives of the organization in mind. GIST adherents also praise its ability to capture and prioritize every idea and task during the planning process, instead of solely focusing on a few "big ticket" items.

General Availability (GA)

General Availability (GA) is the release of a product to the general public. When a product reaches GA, it becomes available through the company's general sales channel — as opposed to a limited release, or beta version, used primarily for testing and user feedback purposes.

Churn Rate

Generally referred to the turnover rate of users or customers of a product. It's also commonly referred to as attrition rate. TERM IN ACTION: "We initially had a low churn rate, but now customers are signing up and leaving like our product is a revolving door!"

Small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs)

Generally, businesses with under 1,000 employees.

Angular

Google's web development framework for building web apps. Several popular websites, like Tesla,Nasdaq, and The Weather Channel, use Angular.

Lifetime value (LTV)

How much money a customer will bring you, directly or indirectly, over the duration of yourrelationship with them. For instance, if a college bookstore thinks that students will spend $500 a yearon textbooks over 4 years of school, each student's lifetime value would be $2,000. Generally,companies will only try to acquire a customer if their lifetime value is higher than the cost of turningthem into a customer (known as customer acquisition cost, or CAC).

Bounce rate

How often visitors to your app or website leave without doing anything meaningful, such as clickinga link. A high bounce rate might suggest that visitors aren't interested in what the website has to offer.

Impact Mapping

Impact Mapping is a graphic strategy planning method to decide which features to build into a product. As it begins with the intended goal and extends out from there, all identified features have a direct impact on achieving that goal and a clear rationale for how they will do so. Impact Mapping was introduced to the world by Gojko Adzic in 2012 in his book Impact Mapping.

Acceptance Criteria

In Agile, acceptance criteria refers to a set of predefined requirements that must be met in order to mark a user story complete. Acceptance criteria are also sometimes called the "definition of done" because they determine the scope and requirements that must be executed by developers to consider the user story finished. As a product manager or product owner, you may be responsible for writing acceptance criteria for the stories in your product backlog. In this article, we'll define acceptance criteria, look at a few examples, and explore some best practices for writing it.

Acceptance Test

In software development, an acceptance test refers to the process of testing a new system, feature, or functionality against predefined acceptance criteria. In other words, an acceptance test evaluates whether or not the product has met predefined requirements.

Sprint

In agile methodology, a sprint is a period (e.g., 14 days) in which an agreed-upon set of development tasks takes place. The agile methodology embraces short, frequent bursts of development, and iterative product releases. In contrast to more traditional product development where larger chunks of functionality are built at a time, release cycles may be months-long and don't ship until everything is completed. In agile, Sprints are much shorter blocks of development. The goal is to get new functionality and improvements into customers' hands as quickly as possible. Sprint lengths vary by organization but often last less than one month. If something is too large for a single sprint, it's broken down into smaller components and spread across more than one. Sprints usually begin with an agile sprint planning meeting. There the agile team will agree on the sprint goals. Sprint goals are what the sprint is trying to achieve, i.e., introducing new functionality, improving performance, optimizing UX, improving conversions. Sprint goals are always measurable. Development teams select items from the sprint backlog, which is a subset of product backlog items. These items are ready to be built now and prioritized by the agile sprint team based on how efficiently and effectively they meet the sprint's goal. Seldom are changes made to a sprint's contents after defining it. Sometimes an item may prove too large or difficult to complete and fall out of the scope. Likewise, there may be room to squeeze in extra details. But the sprint goal never changes. After completing an agile sprint, the next one begins, with its own goals, items, and cadence.

Soft Skills

In contrast to hard skills that can be directly taught, soft skills are traits like empathy, emotional intelligence and persuasiveness that take an individual longer to develop, but can still be learned through personal development and emulation. TERM IN ACTION: "Although our engineering department is very adept with their hard/technical skills, they lack communication skills and empathy. We told them they need to improve their soft skills."

User Flows

In most cases, when a customer or user is interacting with a product, they are going on a tiny journey. The paths they take on this mini journey is what is known as the User Flow. TERM IN ACTION: "From the landing to the checkout page, our goal is to make our User Flow as enjoyable as possible."

User Research

In order to understand the behavior, desire, and drive of your customer, you must conduct User Research. TERM IN ACTION: "We had no idea what our target audience really wanted until we conducted an extensive User Research."

Definition of Done

In the Scrum agile framework, Definition of Done describes the requirements that must be met in order for a story to be considered complete. Definition of Done is typically used by the entire team to agree on the overall quality and completeness that a finished product must exhibit. This concept differs from acceptance criteria in that it is a wide-ranging set of requirements that can apply to all items in the backlog (i.e. quality).

Definition of Ready

In the Scrum agile framework, Definition of Ready describes the requirements that must be met in order for a story to move from the backlog to development. In keeping with agile tradition, Ready is often defined as a story that can be acted on immediately.

Sprint Planning

In the Scrum agile framework, a sprint planning meeting is an event that establishes the product development goal and plan for the upcoming sprint, based on the team's review of its product backlog. A successful session will yield two important strategic items: -The sprint goal: A short written summary of what the team plans to accomplish in the next sprint. -The sprint backlog: The list of stories and other product backlog items the team has agreed to work on in the upcoming sprint.

IaaS

Infrastructure-as-a-Service: tools that let you rent out another company's server space to run yourapp. One example is Amazon Web Services.

I/O

Input/Output: the process of reading and writing files. It's become almost synonymous with tech, tothe point where many startups use the ".io" domain ending.

Prioritization

Product Managers rarely have enough resources to achieve everything on their to-do list. Prioritization is the art and science of deciding what is important to do now, and what can wait until later, based on balancing cost with benefit (resources required versus potential reward). TERM IN ACTION"Our PM is an expert at prioritization. She knows what needs to be done now, soon, and later. She knows exactly which tasks are a priority."

Iterative Testing

Iterative testing refers to the process of making small changes or updates to a product and testing them against predefined baseline metrics. It is commonly practiced un a UI/UX context but can be used in the context of product management as well.

Kanban Roadmap

Kanban roadmap can help product managers leverage the Kanban methodology in their strategic planning. The Kanban technique involves grouping initiatives into clearly marked buckets such as 'planned', 'in process', 'completed', and 'blocked.' Applying this technique to product roadmapping can help product teams see the sequencing of their product strategy in a big-picture, long-term context.

Key Performance Indicator (KPI)

Key performance indicators, or KPIs, are quantitative metrics that organizations use to track and analyze performance or progress toward business objectives. Organizations typically choose to monitor KPIs they deem mission-critical to the overall success of the company. These could include financial metrics, such as revenue or profit targets, customer metrics, such as the growth rate of new users, and supply-chain metrics, such as time to delivery. Simply put, KPIs help a business understand how it's performing in the areas most important to its success.

Responsive web design

Making websites work well on all screen sizes — phones, tablets, laptops, etc. For instance, the NewYork Times might show several columns of text on bigger screens (and the print paper), but just onecolumn on smaller screens.

Customer Advisory Board

Many businesses use a customer advisory board, or CAB, to assist them with market and customer research efforts. A customer advisory board is a group of customers who come together on a regular basis to share insights and advice with an organization. Usually, the members of a customer advisory board are high-level executives at their organizations and therefore can provide in-depth market insight.

MVP

Minimum Viable Product: in Agile, an early-stage prototype used for early testing. For instance,consider the MVP of the online shoe seller Zappos. The founders took photos of shoes at local storesand posted them on a website — and whenever someone "purchased" a shoe, the founders wouldbuy the shoe from the store and mail it to them.17 An MVP is just a simple, early version of an app tosee if people like the idea.

MVC

Model-View-Controller: A way of organizing code, which often builds on Object-OrientedProgramming. Many web or app development frameworks use MVC.

Get Out of the Building

Most of us work in nice, controlled environments. But your customer won't be using your product in a corporate office. They'll be using it in the messy, chaotic real world. Get Out of the Building is short hand for leaving your comfort zone and getting to know your customers in their own environment. TERM IN ACTION: "We had no idea what our customers really wanted, so we had to Get Out of the Building."

NLP

Natural Language Processing: a form of artificial intelligence that deals with understanding humanlanguages.

OOP

Object Oriented Programming: a way of structuring code so it's easier to understand, reuse, and build on. You represent everything as an object, from interface elements like Button or Picture to concepts like Customer or Dog. For instance, Snapchat could have objects like User, Snap, Group, Sticker, Story, or Camera Button. Each object has its own associated information and actions for instance, a Dog could know its name and know how to bark.

Objectives and Key Results

Objectives and Key Results (better known as OKRs) is a management strategy for setting business objectives and measurable outcomes. It relies on set, tracked, and re-evaluated goals paired with measurable results.

DEEP Backlog

Obtaining a DEEP Backlog is one of the suggested objectives of a product backlog grooming session. DEEP is an acronym used to indicate a few key traits of an effective product backlog. Here is what each letter in this acronym stands for: -Detailed Appropriately: items in the backlog contain enough contextual information to be understood and discussed. -Emergent: it is easy to add new stories and items as new information arises. -Estimated: the amount of effort involved with each item is roughly estimated with a standardized measure. -Prioritized: items on the backlog are ranked based on their value and the strategic purpose(s) they serve.

jQuery

One of the most famous web development libraries, jQuery is a JavaScript tool that makes interactivewebsites much easier to build.

Java

One of the world's most popular languages, Java is used to write Android apps, web servers, anddesktop apps.

Opportunity Scoring

Opportunity scoring is one of several popular strategies for prioritizing features on a product roadmap. Product teams use this strategy when they want to learn which features customers view as important but are currently unhappy with. Improving these features can represent opportunities for the product to win increased customer satisfaction and loyalty and also to attract new customers.

Product Manager (PM)

PMs sit at the intersection of business, design, and engineers. Based on what the customers andbusiness need, PMs decide what products (apps, websites, or hardware) to make and what featuresthe products need to have, then work with engineers to build and launch the products. Think of themas the conductors of the orchestra: they help all the various parts work together to make a great pieceof music (or software, in this case).

Software engineer

People who write code and build out software. Also known as SWE, software developer, or dev.

Planning Poker

Planning poker (also called Scrum poker) helps agile teams estimate the time and effort needed to complete each initiative on their product backlog. The name from this gamified technique is planning poker because participants use physical cards. These cards, which look like playing cards, estimate the number of story points for each backlog story or task up for discussion.

Prioritization

Prioritization is the process by which a set of items are ranked in order of importance. In product management, initiatives that live in the backlog must be prioritized as a means of deciding what should be developed next. There are a number of prioritization methods commonly used by product managers, such as: -Kano Model -Weighted Scoring -Opportunity Scoring -MOSCOW -Value vs. Complexity -...and many more

Product Architecture

Product architecture is the organization (or chunking) of a product's functional elements. It's the ways these elements, or chunks, interact. It plays a significant role in how to design, make, sell, use, and repair a new product offering. Linking to system-level design and the principles of system engineering.

Product Design

Product design describes the process of imagining, creating, and iterating products that solve users' problems or address specific needs in a given market. The key to successful product design is an understanding of the end-user customer, the person for whom the product is being created. Product designers attempt to solve real problems for real people by using both empathy and knowledge of their prospective customers' habits, behaviors, frustrations, needs, and wants.

Product Differentiation

Product differentiation is a process used by businesses to distinguish a product or service from other similar ones available in the market. The goal of this tactic is to help businesses develop a competitive advantage and define compelling unique selling propositions (USPs) that set their product apart from competitors. Organizations with multiple products in their portfolio may use differentiation to separate their various products from one another and prevent cannibalization.

Product Enablement

Product enablement helps employees at large companies gain relevant product knowledge. The term takes its name from sales enablement, the process of providing the sales team the resources they need to sell more effectively. Product enablement applies this concept to the entire company. The team creates learning programs specific to each department, intending to improve that department's effectiveness. A product enablement team develops and executes programs that provide relevant product knowledge to employees across the company.

Product Excellence

Product excellence is a customer-focused framework for developing a significant or impactful product or feature and getting it to market quickly. Achieving product excellence (PE) begins with keen user insight. You need to know what customers want, anticipate what they will need, and understand how they will use the new product or feature. This in-depth customer knowledge then informs good product design and reduces the resource drain of developing a feature or product that no one wants or that only benefits a small subset of users.

Product Management Talent

Product leaders are responsible for discovering and recruiting the right people for the product team. To do so, they need to seek out product management talent, or the pool of potential candidates to consider for building the product team and filling key product roles.

Product Ops

Product ops, or product operations, is a role designed to help a company's cross-functional product team operate as effectively as possible. Product ops specialists own many of the product team's behind-the-scenes initiatives. Such as: -Facilitate user interviews and other market research -Oversee quality assurance checks on new features -Analyze data to help product management make better-informed decisions -Develop business processes to streamline product development -Manage the many tools (for roadmapping, prototyping, etc.) the product team uses -Work closely with support and sales to improve the customer experience

Product Portfolio Management

Product portfolio management refers to the practice of managing an organization's entire product portfolio, which consists of all the products the organization has. A product portfolio manager may be responsible for allocating resources for optimal ROI, identifying areas of improvement, and keeping the products aligned with the organization's broader strategy.

Product Requirements Management

Product requirements management is the ongoing process of overseeing the implementation of all requirements needed to deliver a product to the market.

Product-Market Fit

Product-market fit describes a scenario in which a company's target customers are buying, using, and telling others about the company's product in numbers large enough to sustain that product's growth and profitability.

Program Management

Program Management is an organizational function that oversees a group of individual projects linked together through a shared organizational goal or common area of impact. This programmatic grouping of multiple projects provides synergy, consistent management, and greater visibility to stakeholders than individually managed projects.

Rapid Application Development (RAD)

Rapid Application Development is an agile framework focused primarily on rapid prototyping of software products, frequently iterating based on feedback, and continuously releasing updated versions of those products to the market. The RAD model is comprised of four phases: -Phase 1: Requirements planning -Phase 2: User design -Phase 3: Rapid construction -Phase 4: Cutover

Rapid Experimentation

Rapid experimentation is an agile approach to the product development process. With this approach, frequent experiments are deployed in an attempt to discover new, innovative ideas. Experiments can range in severity, from simple A/B tests to larger field experiments.

Rapid Prototyping

Rapid prototyping is an agile strategy used throughout the product development process. With this approach, 3-dimensional prototypes of a product or feature are created and tested in an attempt to optimize characteristics like shape, size, and overall usability.

Rational Product Management

Rational product management is a unifying process for product development. Based on the rational development process used by the software industry, this approach offers a framework to strategically plan, iteratively develop, continuously verify quality, and control changes.

ROM

Read-Only Memory: information that's burned onto hardware and usually can't be changed.Computers store the code needed to start the computer in ROM. Also known as firmware.

Refactoring

Refactoring is the process by which development teams clean up a codebase or change the internal structure of a piece of software to improve it. Refactoring is intended to not make any noticeable impact on the user's end but can make it easier for development teams to continue working on the code and adding new functionalities in the future.

Release Notes

Release notes are documentation produced and distributed alongside a product update or launch. They typically describe what changes come with an update along with any known issues with it. Release notes can be created for both internal or external use.

DACI Decision-Making Framework

The DACI decision-making framework is a model designed to improve a team's effectiveness and velocity on projects, by assigning team members specific roles and responsibilities when it comes to group decisions.

A/B tests

Running experiments to decide which features to put into a product, usually a web-based one. Youshow some users one variation of a feature, and other users a different variation. For instance,Amazon could show half its users a red "buy now" button and the other half a blue button. Thenthey'd look at various metrics, like number of sales or number of clicks, to decide which variation isbetter, and they'd roll out the winning variation to all users. Product managers and developers loveA/B testing, since it helps them scientifically determine how to improve their software.

Scope Creep

Scope creep is the phenomenon in which a team's initial plan—the scope of work it agreed to complete—slowly grows to include more goals, tasks, or requirements. Teams should always be mindful of the threat of scope creep and remain vigilant against it. Any plan can be undermined or even derailed by scope creep, from an architectural firm's scope of work for a new shopping mall, to the agenda for a sales meeting.

Scrum Meeting

Scrum meeting is a catch-all term for the various different meetings practiced by agile scrum teams. Examples of scrum meetings can include daily standups, sprint planning, sprint demos, and retrospectives.

SEO

Search Engine Optimization: changing your website so it shows up higher in Google search results.One example is including the right keywords in your page's title or headings.

Cookie

Small notes that websites store on your browser to remember information about you. For instance,an e-commerce site could store your cart, preferred language, or username in cookies. Cookies alsoenable targeted advertising: websites can pass around your location and other personal informationvia cookies to figure out what you like and hence what ads to show you.

Backend engineer

Software engineers that handle databases and web servers. For instance, Facebook's backendengineers write the code that lets Facebook's supercomputers store billions of photos and handlebillions of daily visitors. See also software engineer.

Frontend engineer

Software engineers who build the customer-facing apps and websites. For instance, Facebook'sfrontend engineers make the Facebook website and apps look good and work well. See also softwareengineer.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Software that a company uses to track its relationships with customers and business partners.Companies can track emails, meeting notes, and other data with CRM software.

SaaS

Software-as-a-Service: software that's delivered over the internet, meaning you'll often use it in yourweb browser. Google Docs is a classic example. You'll often need to pay for SaaS apps on a monthlyor yearly basis instead of paying to download the app upfront.

Lead

Someone who's shown interest in using a service or buying a product. Marketers try to turn strangersinto leads and leads into customers, a process called "inbound marketing."

Release Plan

Sometimes a product needs a flowchart that describes the features that will be presented in upcoming releases. This is what a Release Plan accomplishes. TERM IN ACTION: "Customers became super excited about the latest features in our latest product after the release plan was leaked to the public."

Stakeholder

Stakeholders are individuals (or groups) that can either impact the success and execution of a product or are impacted by a product. The first "upstream" category includes everyone who must contribute to or approve of the activities required to design, build, and bring the product to market. The second "downstream" batch includes both those who purchase or use the product, as well as those who must support, sell, and market it.

Caching

Storing information in a particular place on a computer so you can access it more quickly. It's likestoring your favorite pizza place's phone number in your contacts so you don't have to Google itevery time — it makes recalling the information faster.

Story Mapping

Story mapping is a method for arranging user stories to create a more holistic view of how they fit into the overall user experience. Arranged on a horizontal axis, the fundamental steps of the customer journey (sometimes labeled as epics, sometimes not) are arranged in chronological order based on when a user would perform the particular task relative to their overall workflow with the product.

SQL

Structured Query Language: a language for working with databases. Like Excel, it lets you work withtables, rows, and columns. You can run "queries" to filter, sort, combine, and analyze the data.

The 4 Ds of Time Management

The 4 Ds of time management, sometimes referred to as the 4 Ds of productivity, is a popular strategy for discerning whether or not a task or project is worth your time. It involves making a quick decision about what to act on now either by doing it yourself or delegating to someone else, what to act on in the future, or what to drop from your to-do list. The 4 Ds are: Do, Defer (Delay), Delegate, and Delete (Drop). Placing a task or project into one of these categories helps you manage your limited time more effectively and stay focused on what matters most to you.

Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM)

The Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM) is an agile framework that addresses the entire project lifecycle and its impact on the business. Like the broader agile philosophy, DSDM is an iterative approach to software development, and this framework explicitly states "any project must be aligned to clearly defined strategic goals and focus upon early deliver of real benefits to the business." The framework is built on four principles: feasibility and business study, functional model and prototype iteration, design and build iteration, and implementation.

Eisenhower Matrix

The Eisenhower Matrix is a productivity, prioritization, and time-management framework designed to help you prioritize a list of tasks or agenda items by first categorizing those items according to their urgency and importance.

HEART Framework

The HEART framework is a methodology to improve the user experience (UX) of software. The framework helps a company evaluate any aspect of its user experience according to five user-centered metrics. These metrics, which form the acronym HEART, are: 1. Happiness 2. Engagement 3. Adoption 4. Retention 5. Task success

ICE Scoring Model

The ICE Scoring Model is a relatively quick way to assign a numerical value to different potential projects or ideas to prioritize them based on their relative value, using three parameters: Impact, Confidence, and Ease.

NPS

The NPS or Net Promoter Score is a deviation from the standard way of measuring the loyalty or satisfaction of a customer to a company. Additionally, the NPS states that this score is correlated to the financial growth of a company. TERM IN ACTION: "Through our NPS, we realized that our company could improve on inspiring more loyalty within our customer base."

Product Tree

The Product Tree is a fun, visual, and useful tool that gamifies product management. It helps product managers (PMs) organize, prioritize, and tame the barrage of product feature inputs from customers and internal stakeholders. Product Managers will "prune the product tree."

RICE Scoring Model

The RICE scoring model is a prioritization framework designed to help product managers determine which products, features, and other initiatives to put on their roadmaps by scoring these items according to four factors. These factors, which form the acronym RICE, are reach, impact, confidence, and effort. Using a scoring model such as RICE can offer product teams a three-fold benefit. It can enable product managers to make better-informed decisions, minimize personal biases in decision making, and help them defend their priorities to other stakeholders such as the executive staff.

Scaled Agile Framework

The Scaled Agile Framework, or SAFe, methodology is an agile framework for development teams built on three pillars: Team, Program, and Portfolio. SAFe is designed to give a team flexibility and to help manage some of the challenges larger organizations have when practicing agile. It is designed not so much as a single methodology, but as a broad knowledge base of proven best practices that real teams have used to deliver successful software products.

Product Development Process

The product development process encompasses all steps needed to take a product from concept to market availability. This includes identifying a market need, researching the competitive landscape, conceptualizing a solution, developing a product roadmap, building a minimum viable product, etc.

Shape Up Method

The Shape Up Method describes the specific processes used by product development teams to shape, bet, and build meaningful products. It gives teams language and specific techniques to address the risks and unknowns at each stage of product development with the ultimate goal of shipping a great product on time.

Roadmap

The essential strategy document for all product managers, it lays out your vision, and the stages between where you are now and the realization of that vision. TERM IN ACTION: "Each member of our Product Management department agrees that our roadmap covers all the necessary components of our vision, milestones, and where the product will eventually be completed."

Beta Test

The final trial stages of development for a product that is generally carried out by an unconnected party. Think of it as the last phase of getting your product ready for the big stage. TERM IN ACTION: "We just completed the beta test with Bill from Happy Company, and now we are good to launch it to the market!"

Prototype

The first ever version of a particular product, often experimental and for internal use only, it allows you to test functionality and also is a useful aid for sales and investor acquisition TERM IN ACTION: "The prototype of our app had tons of bugs, but since it was our first version, we were able to gather a tremendous amount of information based on the customer feedback."

Product Portfolio

The full range of products created by a particular company, agency or Product Manager as part of a Resume or CV. TERM IN ACTION: "The reason I got my job as a PM is because of my extensive and impressive Product Portfolio that "wowed" the interviewer."

JavaScript

The language used to make webpages interactive. Every web app you use, from Facebook Messengerto Spotify to Google Maps, uses JavaScript. Nowadays, developers also use JavaScript to build webservers and desktop apps.

HTML

The language used to write webpages. You can create links, images, headers, buttons, and every otherelement on a webpage using HTML. Each of these elements is called a "tag." For instance, a tag called represents an image.

UX: User Experience

The level of ease, intuitiveness and satisfaction that your product gives the user - is it easy and natural to use your product, or difficult and frustrating? TERM IN ACTION: "Changing the UX of our website was critical because our customers were getting confused while navigating the pages of our site."

KPI: Key Performance Indicator

The metrics that matter the most when evaluating the performance of a product. TERM IN ACTION: "With our latest e-commerce product launch, increasing repurchase and conversion rate were the most important KPIs."

Click-through rate (CTR)

The number of people who clicked on an ad divided by the number of people who saw it and had theoption to click on it. In other words, this is the likelihood that an average person would click on thead. It's a way to measure how successful an ad was.

Needfinding

The process of learning about your users and potential customers and uncovering the problems they face that your product could solve for them. TERM IN ACTION: "Each department performed some needfinding so we could be sure that our product filled all the needs of each customer and potential customer."

Product Discovery

The product discovery process has two distinct parts. It includes developing a profound understanding of customers, then using that knowledge to build vital products for customers. Product discovery plays a key role in helping product teams decide which features or products to prioritize and build, while setting the stage for achieving product excellence.

Product Marketing

The public need to be informed about the wonderful product you have created - Product Marketing is about defining a brand and choosing the story you will tell about your product, and clearly communicating your Value Proposition to the people it is aimed at. TERM IN ACTION: "Since the Product Marketing team was super successful in depicting an amazing story of our product, we saw a tremendous amount of success and hit all of our KPIs."

Return on Investment (ROI)

The ratio of a project's profit to its cost.30 For instance, if you spent $2,000 on an ad campaign andsold $2,600 of extra software as a result, your ROI would be 30%. ROI is just a way to measure "bangfor your buck."

Product Spec

The required specifications of a particular product, taking into account compatibility on various devices and platforms and the needs of the end user. TERM IN ACTION: "We had to delay our latest update on our app because it wasn't compatible across all devices. This Product Spec was looked over by our engineering team."

Customer Success

The resolution of the pain point that drove your customer to use your product. This is the final destination - they have successfully achieved the result that your product is set out to deliver or facilitate. TERM IN ACTION: "We knew we achieved customer success when customers left 5-star reviews saying they had finally found the best app to get their smoothies."

Information Flows in Product Management

The success of any product depends on coordination among several departments across the company. In product management, information flow refers to a two-step process for creating a shared understanding of product strategy. In the first step, the product leader gathers various stakeholders to discuss the goals and plans for the product. The second step is for these stakeholders to share this information with their teams.

Stack

The suite of technologies that an app or website is built with. This includes the app's choice offrontend tools, backend tools, and database. As an analogy, a car's "stack" could include a particularkind of upholstery, engine, tires, and headlights, among other things.

Blockchain

The technology behind Bitcoin, blockchain allows for decentralized transactions. Imagine you couldhail an Uber without having to use the Uber app or send someone a message without a company like Facebook or your cell phone provider getting in between. With blockchain, everyone shares a recordof every past interaction, so you don't need a central authority. With Bitcoin, every user has a list ofevery past sale, so no one person or company "owns" Bitcoin. This also protects against fraud, sinceeveryone knows if one person is trying to pull something shady.

Product Analytics

The term product analytics refers to capturing and analyzing quantitative data through embedded tools that record how users interact with a product. This type of usage data can include the most frequently accessed features of a product, the average time users spend taking a specific action, and a map of each user's journey through the product.

LeSS (Large Scale Scrum)

The traditional Scrum agile framework is a method of software development that divides work into teams. Each team works on a few projects at a time, in short-term increments called sprints. The Scrum approach was designed for small individual teams. But a company can apply this prioritization framework to a larger group of product teams working together. One way to do this is to use an approach called large scale Scrum (LeSS). The LeSS approach can work for companies with cross-functional teams ranging in size from a few dozen people to thousands. The two LeSS prioritization frameworks are: -LeSS: from two eight teams working on the same product. -LeSS Huge: as many as a few thousand people working on the same product.

Divergent Thinking

There's more than one way to hammer a nail. Divergent Thinking a is a style of brainstorming where you begin with your problem, and think of various different, creative ways to solve it. TERM IN ACTION: "There was a light bulb moment during our divergent thinking session that spawned the idea for our newest product."

TLS

Transport Layer Security: a method of encrypting information sent over the internet so hackers can'tsnoop on communications. Used in HTTPS.

Tribe Model Management

Tribe model management is part of an agile scaling strategy first used to help Spotify's growing development department. The approach involves breaking engineering teams into autonomous "squads" that work together on specific aspects of the product. Several squads working in the same business area—search technology, for example—are then grouped into a larger team called a tribe.

Scrum Agile Framework

Typically the Scrum agile framework favors moving projects forward via short-term blocks of work called sprints, which are usually confined to two-week intervals. Teams working with this framework are self-organizing and not top-down or hierarchical in nature. Scrum-specific roles include the ScrumMaster, essentially a team guide, and the Product Owner, who represents the business and customers.

User Experience

User Experience refers to the feeling users experience when using a product, application, system, or service. It is a broad term that can cover anything from how well the user can navigate the product, how easy it is to use, how relevant the content displayed is etc.

UX

User Experience: a type of design focusing on making apps and websites easy to use. Deals with howto arrange parts of a website and webpage. Often paired with UI.

UI

User Interface: a type of design focusing on making apps and websites look good. Deals with colors,fonts, layout, etc. Often paired with UX.

Value vs. Complexity

Value vs. complexity is a prioritization framework that allows a product team to evaluate each initiative according to how much value the initiative will bring, and how difficult or complex it will be to implement. Initiatives are then plotted on a quadrant and prioritized accordingly.

Velocity

Velocity is a metric used to measure the speed of a development team's delivery for a given cycle. Velocity is a calculation of the number of story points completed during a cycle. Agile development teams typically calculate velocity at the end of a sprint or iteration.

Voice of Customer (VoC)

Voice of customer, or VoC, refers broadly to the various processes by which organizations gather feedback from their customers. It can also refer to the feedback itself in the form of customer needs, requests, and pain points.

Freemium

Want to get users to use your product? Start by giving users free access to your services. TERM IN ACTION: "Before we start charging our customers for the app, we are going to first give them our freemium model."

Waterfall

Waterfall is a long-term method of product development characterized by a sequential series of stages such as conception, initiation, analysis, design, construction, testing, implementation, and maintenance. The key distinction from agile is that, in a waterfall development environment, once the work for a stage has been completed, the team cannot turn back and development must move on to the next stage.

Kano Model

is an approach to prioritizing features on a product roadmap based on the degree to which they are likely to satisfy customers. Product teams can weigh a high-satisfaction feature against its costs to implement, to determine whether or not adding it to the roadmap is a strategically sound decision. Kano can help teams determine which features will satisfy and even delight customers. Product managers often use the Kano Model to prioritize potential new features by grouping them into categories. These feature categories can range from those that could disappoint customers, to those likely to satisfy or even delight customers.