Glossary.
Sprint retros, kanban, OKRs, RACI, kaizen — what they are and how to run one on a whiteboard.
1:1 meeting
Private recurring meeting between manager and direct report for coaching and feedback.
10% time
Scheduled self-directed time for exploration, experimentation, and learning.
4Ls retro
Four-column retrospective format: Liked, Learned, Lacked, and Longed For.
5Fs retro
Five-column retro: Facts, Feelings, Findings, Future, and Fun.
5S
Sort, Set in order, Shine, Standardize, Sustain — the lean workplace organization system that makes problems visible and inefficiency impossible to hide.
A/B testing
A controlled experiment comparing two variants to determine which moves a metric — the gold standard for optimization decisions.
AARRR funnel
A five-stage framework — Acquisition through Revenue — for measuring growth and diagnosing where users drop off.
Affinity diagram
A technique for organizing qualitative data into natural clusters to surface patterns from user research or brainstorming.
Agile
The iterative approach to product development that values collaboration and responding to change.
Agile coach
A practitioner who guides teams and organizations in adopting and sustaining agile ways of working.
Agile development
The iterative philosophy behind Scrum, Kanban, and XP — built on the Agile Manifesto's four values and twelve principles.
Agile manifesto
The 2001 document that defined four values and twelve principles for agile software development.
All-hands meeting
Company-wide meeting for shared context, strategy updates, and open Q&A.
Amplitude north star
Amplitude's structured playbook for defining a north star metric and the input metrics below it — the most widely-used framework for product strategy alignment.
Architecture review
Formal evaluation of a system design before implementation — scalability, security, and standards.
Backlog grooming
The informal term for backlog refinement — reviewing and clarifying upcoming backlog items.
Backlog refinement
The ongoing Scrum activity of clarifying, estimating, and ordering backlog items before sprint planning.
Balanced scorecard
Four perspectives — financial, customer, internal processes, learning & growth — that give a complete view of performance beyond what financial metrics alone can show.
BCG matrix
A 2x2 of market share versus market growth — the BCG framework that puts every product or business unit into Stars, Cash Cows, Question Marks, or Dogs.
Blameless postmortem
Incident review that focuses on systems and processes — not individual fault.
BPMN
The ISO-standard notation for business processes — detailed enough for a process engine to run, readable enough for a business analyst to review.
Brand guidelines
The rules defining how a brand's identity is applied — logo usage, colors, typography, and voice, documented for consistent execution.
Brief
The document that aligns a team on what to make and why — the investment that prevents three rounds of revisions.
Bug triage
Process of reviewing, prioritizing, and routing bug reports so the worst gets fixed first.
Buyer persona
The person who approves the purchase — often different from the end user, especially in B2B.
CI/CD
The shorthand for automated software pipelines that take code from commit to deployed — the pipeline diagram every engineering team draws on the whiteboard.
Code review
Peer examination of code changes before merge — bugs, standards, and knowledge sharing.
Competitive analysis
Structured evaluation of competitors across features, pricing, and positioning to inform strategy.
Concept map
Nodes connected by labeled arrows — concept maps make relationships explicit in a way mind maps can't.
Continuous delivery
Software always ready to ship — releasing becomes a business decision because the pipeline guarantees the artifact is valid.
Continuous deployment
Every green build ships automatically — no manual release gate, because the test suite is trusted and feature flags decouple code from features.
Continuous discovery
The practice of talking to customers every week to keep the team's understanding of needs current and grounded.
Continuous integration
Merge early, merge often, run tests automatically — CI turns integration from a terrifying monthly event into a routine daily habit.
Crazy eights
An ideation exercise: sketch eight distinct ideas in eight minutes to force rapid divergent thinking.
Creative brief
The document that gives a creative team what they need to do great work — objective, audience, message, constraints.
Critical path
The longest chain of dependent tasks — the sequence that sets the project's minimum completion date and tells you where delays actually hurt.
Customer development
Steve Blank's four-step framework for building a startup around validated customer learning instead of internal assumptions.
Customer discovery
The process of testing whether the problem you think you're solving is real, urgent, and worth paying to fix.
Customer journey map
A visual diagram tracing a customer's end-to-end experience — touchpoints, emotions, and pain points at each stage.
Daily standup
The 15-minute daily sync where the team shares progress, plans, and blockers.
Data flow diagram
Four symbols — entities, processes, stores, and flows — that map exactly how data moves through any system, from a simple API to a full enterprise platform.
Decision matrix
Weighted scoring grid that ranks options against criteria for auditable decisions.
Definition of done
The shared checklist every backlog item must pass before the team calls it complete.
Definition of ready
The checklist a backlog item must pass before the team will pull it into sprint planning.
Dependency graph
Nodes and arrows showing what must be done before something else can start — essential for sequencing both project work and software builds.
Design brief
The document that defines the design problem to solve — before a designer opens Figma or picks up a marker.
Design critique
Structured in-progress feedback session focused on improving design work, not evaluating designers.
Design review
Formal milestone gate evaluating completed design before it moves to engineering.
Design sprint
Google Ventures' five-day process for prototyping and testing a solution before building it.
Design system
A shared library of components, tokens, and guidelines that keeps a product's UI consistent and speeds up design and engineering.
Design thinking
IDEO's human-centered problem-solving approach: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test.
DevOps
The culture and practice of unifying dev and ops to ship faster, more reliably, with shared ownership of what happens in production.
Discovery / delivery split
The dual-track model where discovery figures out what to build while delivery builds what's already validated.
Discovery call
Early-stage conversation to understand problems and context before pitching a solution.
DMADV
Define, Measure, Analyze, Design, Verify — the Six Sigma methodology for designing new products and processes when improvement alone isn't enough.
DMAIC
Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control — the Six Sigma roadmap for fixing a broken process with data instead of guesswork.
Dot voting
A fast group prioritization technique where participants place sticker dots on their preferred options.
Double diamond
The UK Design Council's model showing two diverge-then-converge phases: discover the right problem, design the right solution.
Eisenhower matrix
2x2 framework that sorts tasks by urgency and importance — do, schedule, delegate, or delete.
Elevator pitch
A 30–60 second verbal description of a product that communicates what it is, for whom, and why it matters.
Empathy map
A visual tool capturing what a user thinks, feels, says, and does — to build shared understanding before designing.
Entity relationship diagram
The standard way to model a database before you build it — entities, attributes, and the relationships that connect them.
Epic
A large agile feature that spans multiple sprints and gets broken into user stories.
ERD
The abbreviation for entity relationship diagram — shorthand for 'let's design the database schema before we build.'
Fishbone diagram
Cause-and-effect diagram shaped like a fish skeleton for root cause analysis.
Five whys
Root cause analysis by asking 'why' iteratively until the real cause surfaces.
Flowchart
Standardized shapes and arrows that map any process from start to finish — one of the oldest and most useful diagrams in the whiteboard toolkit.
Flowmap
Arrows and lines showing movement between points — from supply chain routes to user conversion funnels.
Gantt chart
Horizontal bars on a timeline — the classic project schedule format for showing what's happening, when, and for how long.
Gemba walk
Go to where the work happens, observe, and ask why — the lean practice of understanding processes from the floor, not from the conference room.
Growth experiment
A structured test for validating whether a specific change will move a product metric before committing to build it.
Growth loop
A self-reinforcing cycle where product usage creates more product usage — the engine behind compounding growth.
Happiness radar
Team health check that scores satisfaction across multiple dimensions on a radar chart.
Happy / sad / mad retro
Emotion-first retro variant — positives first to set a constructive tone.
High-fidelity mockup
A pixel-accurate visual design that looks like the finished product — used for approval, engineering handoff, and marketing.
How Might We (HMW)
A design thinking technique for reframing problems as open-ended questions that invite creative solutions.
ICP
The abbreviation for ideal customer profile — the type of customer most likely to succeed with your product.
Ideal customer profile
The description of the customer type that gets the most value from your product — built from your best existing customers.
Impact/effort matrix
A 2x2 visual tool that plots work by impact and effort to find quick wins and avoid time sinks.
Incident postmortem
Written document after an incident — timeline, root cause, and action items as a learning record.
Incident review
Post-incident meeting to reconstruct what happened and prevent recurrence.
Initiative
The highest level of the agile hierarchy — a large business goal containing multiple epics.
Innovation day
A structured 24-hour pause from regular work for self-directed building and experimentation.
Ishikawa diagram
Formal name for the fishbone cause-and-effect diagram developed by Kaoru Ishikawa.
Jobs to be done
A framework that frames customer decisions as hiring a product to accomplish a specific underlying goal.
Jobs to be done canvas
A workshop tool for mapping a customer's situation, job, motivations, and switching triggers.
Jobs to be done interview
A structured interview technique for uncovering the real job a customer hired your product to do — and what caused them to switch.
Kaizen
The Japanese philosophy of continuous, incremental improvement — and the practice that drives the Toyota Production System and modern operations teams.
Kanban
The lean-agile method that visualizes workflow and limits WIP to optimize continuous flow.
Kanban board
The visual workflow tool with columns and cards showing work moving from backlog to done.
Kano model
A framework that categorizes features by how their presence or absence affects customer satisfaction.
Kickoff meeting
First meeting of a project that aligns goals, scope, roles, and timeline.
KPI
A quantitative measure tied to a specific business or product goal — not just any number on a dashboard.
Lean
The Toyota-originated philosophy of maximizing value and systematically eliminating waste.
Lean canvas
Ash Maurya's one-page startup business model template focused on problems, solutions, and key assumptions.
Lean startup
Eric Ries's methodology for building products under uncertainty using Build-Measure-Learn loops.
Low-fidelity wireframe
A rough structural sketch of a screen — quick to make, disposable, and specifically designed to invite structural feedback.
Mad / sad / glad retro
Emotion-first retro format surfacing frustration, disappointment, and satisfaction.
Messaging
The specific words and phrases a product uses to communicate its value — downstream of positioning, upstream of all copy.
Messaging framework
A structured reference document organizing a product's core messages by audience, context, and hierarchy.
Microservices architecture
Breaking a system into small, independently deployable services — a pattern that trades operational complexity for deployment speed and organizational independence.
Mind map
A radial diagram that branches ideas out from one central concept — the natural starting point for any brainstorm or planning session.
Minimum lovable product
The smallest product users will actually love — not just tolerate. Scope ruthlessly, execute the core brilliantly.
Minimum marketable feature
The smallest piece of functionality worth shipping on its own — the unit of agile release planning that keeps roadmaps moving.
Minimum viable product
The simplest product that tests the core value hypothesis with real users and generates validated learning.
Mission, vision, values
Three distinct declarations: why you exist today (mission), where you're going (vision), and how you operate (values) — the foundation every strategy document should rest on.
MMF
The abbreviation for minimum marketable feature — what teams say in planning when they want to cut a big feature down to the smallest shippable slice.
Moodboard
A visual collage of references that establishes design direction before the design itself is made.
MoSCoW prioritization
Must/Should/Could/Won't — a framework for aligning teams on scope and trade-offs.
Multivariate testing
Testing multiple variables simultaneously to find the best-performing combination — more powerful than A/B, but requires more traffic.
MVP
Minimum Viable Product — the simplest version of a product that tests your most critical assumption.
MVP vs MLP
Two frameworks for scoping a first release — MVP optimizes for learning, MLP optimizes for delight and word-of-mouth growth.
Network diagram
Nodes and edges representing any connected system — from project task networks to IT infrastructure topology.
North star framework
One metric that captures your product's core value, with a tree of input metrics below it — the framework that aligns teams around what actually matters.
North star metric
The single metric that best captures whether your product is delivering real value to real users.
Objectives & key results
Andy Grove's goal-setting framework: one inspiring objective, two to five measurable key results. The OKR system that runs Google, LinkedIn, and thousands of product teams.
Objectives and key results
The full breakdown of OKRs: how Objectives and Key Results work together to drive team focus.
Offsite
Off-premises meeting for strategy, planning, and conversations that need deep focus.
OKRs
A goal-setting framework pairing ambitious Objectives with measurable Key Results.
One-pager
A single-page document that communicates a product or proposal clearly enough to inform a decision — built on selection, not compression.
PDCA cycle
Plan, Do, Check, Act — Deming's four-step loop that underlies every serious continuous improvement system from lean manufacturing to agile sprints.
PERT chart
A network of tasks and arrows that shows dependencies and handles scheduling uncertainty — built for complex, multi-track projects.
PESTLE analysis
Macro-environmental framework across Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal, and Environmental forces.
Pirate metrics
The AARRR framework: Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, Revenue — for mapping where your product grows and where it leaks.
Plan, do, check, act
The plain-language version of PDCA — four steps that turn any improvement idea into a testable experiment and any experiment into a standard.
Porter's five forces
Industry analysis framework assessing rivalry, entrants, substitutes, buyer power, and supplier power.
Positioning
The deliberate choice of what mental slot your product occupies relative to alternatives — upstream of every message you write.
Positioning statement
Internal declaration of who the product is for, what it does, and how it differs — the foundation for all messaging.
Post-mortem
Structured review after a failure or incident — timeline, root cause, and action items.
PRD review
Structured walkthrough of a Product Requirements Document before engineering begins.
Pre-mortem
Imagine the project already failed — then identify why, before it starts.
Problem discovery
Identifying and validating which customer problems are real, frequent, and painful enough to be worth solving.
Process map
A visual of how work actually flows through an organization — the starting point for any serious operations improvement effort.
Product backlog
The ordered list of all potential work owned and prioritized by the Product Owner.
Product delivery
The execution phase — engineering, design, testing, shipping — that follows validated product decisions.
Product discovery
The work of figuring out what to build and why, before engineering starts building it.
Product owner
The Scrum accountability responsible for the product backlog and maximizing product value.
Product review
Recurring meeting where product leadership evaluates roadmap progress and prioritization.
Product roadmap
A shared plan showing where the product is going and what the team will focus on next.
Product strategy
The high-level plan defining what a product will do, for whom, and why it will win.
Product-led growth
A go-to-market strategy where the product drives acquisition and conversion — no sales team required.
Prototype
An interactive simulation of a product or feature — built to test whether a design works before engineering builds the real thing.
Pull system
A workflow model where team members take on new work only when they have capacity for it.
RACI chart
Grid artifact showing task ownership across R, A, C, and I roles.
RACI matrix
Responsibility grid mapping tasks to Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed roles.
Responsibility matrix
Umbrella term for any grid mapping who is responsible for what — RACI, DACI, and more.
RICE prioritization
A scoring model that ranks features by Reach × Impact × Confidence / Effort.
Root cause analysis
Structured process to find the fundamental cause of a problem — not just the symptom.
Sailboat retro
Metaphor-based retro with wind, anchors, rocks, and an island destination.
Scrum
The agile framework organizing work into sprints with defined roles, ceremonies, and artifacts.
Scrum Master
The Scrum role responsible for coaching the framework, facilitating ceremonies, and removing blockers.
Scrum team
The small, cross-functional group of developers, Product Owner, and Scrum Master who deliver each sprint.
Security review
Pre-ship evaluation for vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and data risks.
Sequence diagram
Vertical lifelines and horizontal arrows show exactly how systems exchange messages — the standard tool for designing and reviewing API interactions.
Service blueprint
A diagram showing both the customer experience and the backstage processes that deliver it.
Service blueprint diagram
The full map of a service delivery — customer actions, frontstage moments, and the backstage systems that make them possible.
Six Sigma
The data-driven quality methodology targeting 3.4 defects per million — built at Motorola, scaled at GE, still the standard for serious process improvement.
Skip-level meeting
Meeting between a leader and an employee two levels down — unfiltered ground-truth signal.
Solution validation
Testing whether a proposed solution actually solves the problem — before engineering builds it.
Spec review
Pre-implementation review of a technical spec for completeness, correctness, and feasibility.
Speedboat retro
Impediment-focused retro — identify and vote on the anchors slowing your team.
Spiral model
Risk-driven iterative development — each loop of the spiral resolves the biggest unknowns before committing more investment.
Sprint backlog
The team's committed work for the current sprint — user stories plus the tasks to deliver them.
Sprint goal
The one-sentence outcome statement that explains why the sprint exists.
Sprint planning
The Scrum ceremony that opens each sprint — team selects backlog items and commits to a sprint goal.
Sprint retro
The Scrum ceremony where teams reflect on process and agree what to change next sprint.
Sprint review
The end-of-sprint Scrum ceremony where the team demos completed work to stakeholders.
Staff meeting
Recurring meeting between a manager and direct reports for alignment and decisions.
Starfish retro
Five-arm retro: Keep Doing, Less Of, More Of, Stop Doing, Start Doing.
Start / stop / continue retro
Three-column retro format: what to start, stop, and keep doing.
Story points
Relative units of estimation for backlog items — measuring complexity and uncertainty, not hours.
Storyboard
A sequence of sketched panels showing how a user experiences a product over time — context, action, and outcome.
Strategy map
A one-page visual of how your strategic objectives connect — from building capabilities at the bottom to delivering financial results at the top.
Style guide
The reference document defining visual and editorial standards — so teams can work consistently without approval on every decision.
Swimlane diagram
A flowchart split into ownership lanes — the fastest way to see where handoffs happen and who's responsible for each step.
SWOT analysis
Strategic framework mapping Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.
System architecture diagram
Boxes, arrows, and labels showing how a software system's components connect — the diagram every engineering team draws at the start of a big project.
Talking points
The key messages a speaker uses to stay consistent and on-brand — three to seven bullets that anchor every conversation.
Theme
A strategic grouping of related epics that represents a high-level area of product focus.
Three amigos meeting
Pre-sprint alignment between product, development, and testing on story acceptance criteria.
Timeline retro
Retro format that maps events and emotions across a chronological timeline.
Two-pager
A two-page document that adds proof, context, or detail beyond what a one-pager can hold — without requiring a full proposal.
UML diagram
The standard visual language for software design — fourteen diagram types covering both structure (what the system is) and behavior (what it does).
Usability testing
Watching real users complete tasks to discover where they struggle — more revealing than surveys or analytics alone.
User interview
A structured conversation with a real user to understand their context, problems, and behavior — not their opinions about your ideas.
User persona
A research-based representation of a key user type, built to guide product decisions — not a demographic profile.
User story
A feature description written from the user's perspective — As a [user], I want [goal], so that [reason].
UX research review
Session where researchers share user study findings to inform product and design decisions.
V-model
Waterfall with paired testing phases — the standard in regulated industries where every requirement must trace to a test.
V2MOM
Salesforce's one-page alignment framework: Vision, Values, Methods, Obstacles, Measures — unusual for naming what's blocking you as a first-class planning input.
Value chain analysis
Maps activities a company performs to create value — revealing where competitive advantage lives.
Value proposition
The clear statement of what your product does, for whom, and why it beats the alternative.
Value proposition canvas
Osterwalder's tool for mapping product features to customer jobs, pains, and gains to design for fit.
Value stream map
A process map with time data attached — the lean tool for finding exactly where work waits, piles up, or gets repeated unnecessarily.
Velocity
The average story points a team completes per sprint, used to forecast future capacity.
Visual identity
The complete set of visual elements — logo, color, type, iconography — that make a brand recognizable across every touchpoint.
Voice of customer
Systematically capturing what customers say in their own words — and translating that language into product decisions.
Waterfall
The sequential 'finish phase one before starting phase two' model — still the default for regulated industries and fixed-scope contracts, less suited to products that need to learn.
WIP limit
A cap on items allowed in a Kanban column — forces finishing before starting new work.
Wireframe
A structural blueprint of a screen — layout, hierarchy, and function without visual design.
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