Some Product Management-related terminology

This is a brief take on the Product Management-related terminology I use in this blog and my résumé. I hope it helps to avoid ambiguity that naturally clings to the buzzwords of the modern tech world.

…in the majority of matters on which the learned dispute, the question is almost always one of names¹

— René Descartes

Product Management terminology #

Conversion rate: a metric that shows the percentage of users who complete a desired action (such as a purchase) out of the total number of users who interacted with a product.

CLTV (Customer Life Time Value): a metric that estimates the total revenue a business can expect from a single customer throughout their relationship.

SCF (Supply Chain Finance): a set of financial solutions that helps both buyers and suppliers manage their working capital by improving payment terms and reducing financial risks across the supply chain.

ROI (Return on Investment): a metric that evaluates the effectiveness of an investment in a marketing campaign by relating it to the revenue.

CES (Customer Effort Score): a metric, which measures how much effort a customer has to exert to resolve an issue, complete a task, or interact with a business. Measured through a survey question like:

To what extent do you agree with the statement: ‘The company made it easy for me to complete my task/resolve my issue.’?

Respondents rate their experience on a scale from 1 (Strongly Disagree) to 7 (Strongly Agree).

JTBD (Jots To Be Done): a framework that focuses on understanding the “jobs” or tasks that customers are trying to accomplish when they use a product. It shifts the focus from the product features themselves to the underlying customer needs and goals, helping teams design solutions that meet user demands.

YoY (Year over Year): a term used to compare a particular metric over the course of one year with the same metric from the previous year. This comparison helps assess performance over a 12-month period.

NPS (Net Promoter Score): a metric used to gauge customer loyalty and satisfaction by measuring how likely customers are to recommend a company’s product or service to others. It is often used as an indicator of customer experience and overall brand perception.

NPS is typically measured through a single survey question:

On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend (Company/Product) to a friend or colleague?

• Promoters (score 9-10): Customers who are highly satisfied and likely to recommend the product or service. They are loyal and can drive growth through positive word-of-mouth.
• Passives (score 7-8): Customers who are satisfied but not enthusiastic enough to actively promote the product. They are neutral and unlikely to negatively affect the brand.
• Detractors (score 0-6): Customers who are unhappy with the product and unlikely to recommend it. They may even discourage others from using the product or service.

To calculate NPS, subtract the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters.

SLG (Sales Led Growth): a business strategy where the sales team plays a central role in driving customer acquisition, revenue, and product adoption. The sales team actively prospect, nurture leads, and convert them into paying customers, often through direct sales efforts such as demos, personalized outreach, and negotiation.

PLG (Product Led Growth): a business strategy where the product itself drives customer acquisition, expansion, and retention. In a PLG model, the product is the primary driver of growth, meaning users can experience, evaluate, and often buy the product without the need for a dedicated sales team or traditional marketing efforts. The product “sells itself” by offering value, a seamless experience, and ease of use that motivates users to adopt and stick with it.

SME (Small and Medium Enterprises): businesses that fall within a specific size range (that varies by country and industry) based on criteria such as number of employees, annual revenue, or total assets. They generally represent independent businesses that are smaller than large corporations but play a crucial role in economic growth, employment, and innovation.

SLT (Senior Leadership Team): a group of top executives and senior managers within an organization responsible for strategic decision-making, overall business direction, and operational leadership.

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): a key performance metric that measures how satisfied customers are with a product, service, or interaction. It is typically collected through customer feedback surveys, where respondents rate their satisfaction on a predefined scale. Customers are asked a question like: “How satisfied were you with your experience?”. They respond using a scale from Very Dissatisfied to Very Satisfied. The CSAT score is then calculated as a ratio of Satisfied to Total responses.

Tech terminology #

DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment): a team that is part of Google Cloud that engages in opinion polling of software engineers to conduct research for the DevOps movement.

The DORA team began publishing State of DevOps Reports in 2013. The latest DORA State of DevOps Report published in 2023 found culture and a customer-centric focus key to success, whilst AI was providing limited benefits.

For the purposes of their research, Four Key Metrics, sometimes referred to as DORA Metrics, are used to assess the performance of teams.

The four metrics are as follows:

• Change Lead Time - Time to implement, test, and deliver code for a feature (measured from first commit to deployment)
• Deployment Frequency - Number of deployments in a given duration of time
• Change Failure Rate - Percentage of failed changes over all changes (regardless of success)
• Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR) - Time it takes to restore service after production failure

CI/CD (Continuous Integration & Continuous Deployment/Delivery): a practice that automates the process of integrating code changes, testing, and deploying software.

Nexus: a universal binary repository manager that helps development teams store, manage, and distribute software components.

Grafana: an open-source platform used for monitoring, observability, and data visualization.

Prometheus: an open-source monitoring and alerting tool designed for time-series data collection.

Jenkins: an open-source automation server used for CI/CD. It helps automate builds, testing, and deployments.

Ansible: an open-source automation tool used for configuration management, application deployment, and infrastructure provisioning. It enables DevOps teams to automate repetitive tasks.

Terraform: an open-source Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool developed by HashiCorp. It allows developers and DevOps teams to define, provision, and manage cloud infrastructure using declarative configuration files.

SonarQube: an open-source platform for continuous code quality and security analysis. It helps teams detect bugs, code smells, vulnerabilities, and technical debt by scanning source code automatically.

OpenShift: a Kubernetes-based container application platform developed by Red Hat. It provides an environment for deploying, managing, and orchestrating containerized applications in cloud, on-prem, or hybrid environments.

vSphere: A virtualization platform that provides the foundation for managing and deploying virtualized infrastructure in data centres. It is used to create virtual machines (VMs) and manage resources in virtualized environments, such as compute, storage, and networking.

DevEx (Developer Experience): refers to the overall experience and satisfaction developers have when working with a company’s tools, platforms, processes, and workflows. A positive DevEx improves developer productivity, reduces friction, and enhances the quality of code and collaboration within teams.

MS BI (Microsoft Business Intelligence): refers to a suite of tools and technologies to help organizations collect, analyse, and visualize data for better decision-making.

LAMP (Linux - Apache - MySQL - PHP): the LAMP stack is a collection of open-source software used for developing dynamic websites and web applications.

Power BI: a business analytics tool developed by Microsoft that enables organizations to visualize their data, share insights, and make data-driven decisions.

Dynatrace: a platform for end-to-end monitoring of applications, infrastructure, and user experience. It is designed to help developers, IT operations teams, and business stakeholders monitor and optimize the performance of complex cloud-native environments, microservices architectures, and hybrid cloud systems.

GA (Google Analytics): a web analytics service offered by Google that helps developers, marketers, and product managers track and analyse user behaviour on websites and mobile applications.

DDD (Domain Driven Design): a concept and methodology in software development that emphasizes collaboration between technical and business teams to create a shared understanding of the problem domain. The goal is to design systems that closely align with real-world business processes and logic, ensuring that the software effectively addresses the needs of the business.

CT (Cycle Time): refers to the total time a unit (e.g., a task, product, or customer request) spends in a system from the moment it enters the queue until it exits after being processed. It is a key performance metric in queueing theory, operations management, and lean processes.

TTFC (Time to First Commit): a metric that measures the time it takes for a developer to make their first commit after joining a project, team, or organization. It is often used as an indicator of developer onboarding efficiency, tooling effectiveness, and overall developer experience.

SLO (Service Level Objective): Reliability Targets, often defined as Service Level Objectives (SLOs), are measurable goals that indicate the desired level of reliability, performance, and availability of a system or service. SLOs help teams balance innovation velocity and system stability, ensuring that services remain highly available and performant while allowing for continuous deployment and improvement.

Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC): a structured process that outlines the stages of developing, deploying, and maintaining software applications. Key Phases of SDLC:

• Planning & Requirements Gathering
• System Design
• Development (Coding & Implementation)
• Testing
• Deployment & Release
• Maintenance & Support

Time to Money (TTM): a key performance metric in the banking and financial services industry that measures the time it takes for a customer to receive funds after initiating a financing request. It reflects the efficiency of the loan approval, disbursement, and settlement process and is critical for customer satisfaction and operational performance.

ISO 20022: an international standard for financial messaging that enables structured, rich, and data-driven communication between financial institutions. It defines a common language and format for exchanging financial information across payments, securities, trade finance, treasury, and foreign exchange (FX) transactions.

Application Program Interface (API): a set of rules or protocols that enables software applications to communicate with each other.

Electronic Data Interchange (EDI): a standardized method of electronically exchanging business documents between organizations in a structured, machine-readable format without manual intervention. It replaces paper-based transactions with automated data flows, improving efficiency, accuracy, and speed in business communications.