The profession of product management has been in existence for hundreds of years. However, it only became a popular role in recent 90’s – 00’s due to the rebranding of the profession by the rise of tech companies and the need for specialization.
Product management in its entirety is a broad topic. It is even more complicated, as numerous traditional educational institutions do not have undergraduate programs teaching it. Thus, making it difficult to adopt as a professional career. A few schools now offer extra courses to promote soft landing into a career in product management, such as Havard. I can’t afford it, and I am pretty much sure a lot of people cannot either.
If you choose a career in product management, you will mostly start as a junior/associate product manager and whichever company you get lucky enough to start your career with, you will be working with an experienced team of engineers, marketers, CEO’s, Stakeholders, etc. It is therefore pivotal you can easily flow when they speak English garnished with certain terminologies such as velocity, metrics, triage, sprint, environment and many more other fancy product tech lingo. True story, the first time I heard the word sprint. My brain for some weird reasons showed me a picture of Usain Bolt. Good thing the people in the meeting couldn’t read my thoughts. Lol, this was long before I decided to fully go into tech.
Without any further ado let’s get right into it. Arranged in chronological alphabetical order here are majority of the terms used in tech that you need to know as a product manager. They will be defined concisely using my understanding. Meaning, I will define every word with the simplest definition. I guess, that’s why this is a cheat sheet.
Engineers – these are the people who build the product you are managing or co-managing. Basically, they are software engineers who are experts in software developments. This includes frontend and backend developers.
Communication – this an interaction system with both people in your team, and people in the company.
Stakeholders – these are the people who make major decisions about the product you are building. You can see them as CEO, investors. But you work for them.
Users – these are the people who have adopted your product for use.
Feedback – this is a response gotten when you query anyone or anything. Could be, responses gotten when users respond to your “rate us” CTA.
CTA – Call to action is the visible command you are telling a user to act on. Could be “Buy Now”, “Rate Us”.
Metric – this is a unit in a system of measurement of success or failure level of a feature.
B2B – business to business, it is a model where your clients are another company. E.g. facebook ads.
B2C – business to consumer, it is a model where your clients are individual people. E.g. Facebook chat with friends or post pictures feature.
SAAS – software as a service, this is basically B2B in full scale.
Product manager – you duh! Jk. A product manager is the hub of communication, leadership that sits in the middle of UX, Business and technology. You are an enabler of everyone involved in building a product.
Experiment – a test ran by a product manager. Experimenting is what differs us as product managers from project managers.
Stand up – these are usually 10-15mins daily meetings involving sub team lead of engineering, design. But this entirely depend on the subject of the meeting.
Sprint – it is a part of the agile system. This is a two-week time frame board of which a project must be completed. In some companies a sprint is usually four-weeks.
Product lifecycle – this is the processes that occur from the birth of a product till its death. They are four stages. Introduction, Growth, Maturity, Decline.
Introduction – this is the stage at which a product is newly introduced to the market.
Growth – this is the stage at which a product has been accepted in the market and is now recording advancement in userbase numbers.
Maturity – this stage the product has been accepted, sales are soaring, and competitors begin to swim around like sharks rotating a prey.
Decline – this is the death stage of a product, when a product is losing sales, users and relevance.
Competition – these are the people who do what you do.
Product development – these are the different stages of properly building and launching a product.
Conceive – this is a stage of product development where the idea of a product is being scrutinized.
Product – a product is anything. Can be a feature in a system or the whole system itself. E.g., Facebook is a product. Facebook like feature is a product.
Plan – this is a stage in product development where market research is carried out, to find out if this product will make you money or not. Setting the roadmap, duration of project.
Develop – this is a stage in product development where engineers start building the product, it usually involves specs, epics, user stories.
Iterate – this is a stage in product development where a version of the product is ready for testing such as alpha and beta. Test and improve, test and improve. Before full release to the public. Iteration never ends even when the final product has been released. i.e., there is no ‘final’ product in product management and technology.
Launch – this is a stage in product development where a fresh finished product is released into the market by collaborating with marketing, PR, legal and every team to come up with a strategy.
Steady State – this is a stage in product development where the product has been accepted. Here, you collect data from the users and use it to improve. While marketing still pushes it.
Maintain – this is a stage in product development where after using all the data acquired over time, you decide whether to keep building or kill the product.
Sunsetting – this is a way of killing a product. Just like the name says. “sunsetting” is like the Sun going down. It happens slowly.
Lean – this is a method of only building what needs to be built, based on the resources available.
Start-up – this is a new company that is still within its 1-5 years of operation, with minimal workers. The number of years and staff vary from place to place.
Backlog – this is a place on the sprint board where you dump things that need to be done, but they have blockers, or they are not very critical or do not rank high enough in priority. Or simply, it’s a place where you dump new things that need to be done but are not priorities.
User problem – this is the pain point a user feel. A difficulty experienced by a user when using your product.
Roadmap – This is a projectory of time frames of work that needs to be done under the time frame.
Customer interview – this is defined as a customer development method that includes talking to your customers to learn more about your product from their point of view.
Duration – this is the time it will take for something to happen.
Specs – these are the features of a product.
Features – these are components of functionalities of a product system.
Team – these are the people you work with; it could be made up of a minimum of 1 person and a max of (depends on the firm)
Legal – let’s just say these are the lawyers in your company.
Market research – this is the combing of the market to get more knowledge about your competitors and your market.
To-do / Open – this is a tab in a sprint board allocated to tasks that are in progress.
Blocker – this is a tech lingo used when a task is dependent on another task completion. E.g., if the frontend dev has a task to do but he needs the design from the UI which he is yet to get. In this case the frontend dev has a blocker.
MVP – Minimum Viable Product. This is the product of a lean start up. Wherein it is not the entire product but it has the fundamental features that sells the idea of the product, which is just enough for use.
Agile – this is a system of implementing the lean principles to software development and management.
Software – this is a utility program that you can’t touch but use. Just like hardware vs software.
Dev – this is another name for engineers. Developers or programmers or engineers.
Scrum – this is a project management system that involves real time interaction with all participants in the product, usually completes a project in 2 – 4 weeks.
Kanban – this is more like a freestyle project management system with less interactions, and no deadlines.
Ticket – these are tasks or commands inputted in a project management tool.
Retrospective – this is called a sprint retro. It is when at the end of every sprint. The team comes together to discuss what went down in the last sprint, needs for improvement, help, correction, etc.
Waterfall – this is a project management system that is used to build big projects. Projects where every part of the project will be built at once. E.g., it is recommended when building an OS.
Ideas – these are building blocks of which a product originates from.
Clients – these are paying users of a product.
E.M.U.C – Employees, Metrics, Users and Clients. These are where you get ideas from as a pm.
P.M – Product Manager or Project Managers, using PM is not advised because it can be confusing. But thank goodness for context, right?
Top down – this is a market analysis that less data to make assumptions which are usually optimistic. It is not recommended.
Bottom up – this is a market analysis that uses real comprehensive data to give assumptions that are realistic. It is highly recommended.
Customer – this a paying user.
Triage – a trio of characteristics about a feature.
Direct competitor – these are people who solve same problem you are solving, with similar solution to same customer base.
Indirect competitor – these people solve same problem in a different way for a different customer base. E.g., Go-Pro camera vs Nikkon camera.
Potential competitor – they offer something to same customers, but they don’t address same problem that you address.
Substitute competitor – these are people who solve same problem but not the same way. Whatever you do, ensure your product is not in this category.
Product core – these are the component in charge of the product that make a product successful. Could be the engineering, design, content, etc.
Userbase – the size of active users you have.
Dominate – how powerful your product has been adopted in the market when compared to your competition.
Design – duh! Let’s just say these are the guys who make your product beautiful.
Brand – there are many confusing definitions of a brand. A brand is simply how people see your product. It’s the perception of your product. For example, Toyota is a popular product in Nigeria because it has been perceived as strong. A brand is not “logo”, neither is branding. Branding is selling how people should see you, your style.
Speed – how quickly a task is completed.
Feature table – this is a table used for competitive analysis. It is used to determine if you need to add on or more features compared to your competition.
Criteria – this is a basis for judgment.
Funding – revenue generated through bootstrapping or from investors to support and grow your business.
Acquisition – this is when a company has been bought by a third party. E.g., How the world’s richest man Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, acquired twitter from Jack Dorsey for $44M in 2022.
Customer development – this is the process involved in keeping customers and users.
Framework – this is a working system of proven techniques that can be applied to other systems.
Discovery – this is the first stage in customer development.
Validation – this is a stage in customer development where you validate ideas and or opinions.
Creation – the third stage in customer development.
Building – execution of reviews from customer development.
Risk – these are problems that may come up and how to mitigate them.
Opportunity – this is a rare gap in a market.
Pre-Product – the processes that have occurred before the product completion.
Post-product – the process that happens after initial product completion.
Many thanks for your undivided attention, for ease of visibility this will be split into two as the second part of this article will be released later.