Product Designer Glossary

Planning and Execution

• Agile: Agile methodology is an iterative approach to building projects that involves back-and-forth cycles between creating and building products, sending them to the customer, and getting feedback to improve and plan for the next cycle.

• Scrum: Scrum is a specific instance of Agile methodology that involves sprints where cycles of project development are completed in a 1-2week timeframe iteratively.

• Kanban: Kanban charts, popularized by the company Trello, are ways of organizing projects into cards and columns, similar to post-it notes. They're often used in Scrum/Agile project planning processes with columns like "To-do", "Doing" and "Done."

• Gantt Chart: Gantt charts are a timeline chart to help map out projects over long time scales. Gantt charts are particularly effective to map out several dependencies between various projects or complicated timelines.

• Sprint: Sprints are a unit in a scrum process that involves a set number of bugs/tasks and clear roles and responsibilities to complete them in a certain time interval.

• Milestone: Milestones are often used by engineering managers to break up large, complicated projects into smaller, approachable chunks with clearer deadlines. This can be an effective concept to bring up in interviews asking about project planning.

• Retro(spective): Retrospectives are check-ins, usually at the end of a sprint or project, where the team reflects on what went well and what could be improved about the process. These are important moments to gather feedback and improve the management of the team.

• Waterfall: Waterfall - method of development is a now less-frequently used form of software development that involves a linear approach to software development (unlike Agile). Generally, the process starts with product requirements, then goes to design, implementation, and finally maintenance.

• OKR: OKRs stand for Objectives & Key Results. OKRs are a planning tool to set clear objectives (what you are trying to get to) and key results (how you know you have gotten there). This can help anchor the team on a clear vision and ensure team alignment on goals.

• KPI: KPIs stand for Key Performance Indicators. KPIs are helpful to set clear measurable goals for projects. An example KPI might be increasing conversion rates by 5% by EOY. KPIs are helpful to give the team a clear sense of their goal.

• Technical debt: Technical debt is sort of like the room that you haven't cleaned in a while, and now it's harder to find things in it. While coding quickly can be effective, it usually builds up "debt" that requires maintenance to clean and maintain so that future projects can be built effectively.

• Feature creep: This happens when a scoped-down feature is being developed, and then slowly over time, the feature becomes bigger and bigger, usually because of input and thoughts from the team. Often, an engineering manager should find a way to reduce feature creep to keep the team focused.

• Scope: Scope is the intended size and cost of a project. For instance, a project may be scoped down to a week's time of one engineer.

• Dependency: Dependencies often exist in engineering planning, where one project or person's work may depend on another's being completed. Effective planners know how to plan around dependencies to reduce blockage.

Roles

• Product Designer: This is you! Product designers design the look and user experience of a product. At different companies, there are often different role titles that distinguish different aspects of design skillsets, including UX design, visual design, marketing design, brand design, and more.

• UX Researcher: Often a skillset of the designer, but can also be a different role. The UX researcher focuses on understanding and empathizing with the user, and is often responsible for conducting user interviews and ethnographies.

• Technical lead (TL): A technical lead on a project is the directly responsible individual to ship a particular project. TL's can be managers or senior IC engineers on a team.

• Site reliability engineer (SRE): A site reliability engineer is the person responsible for ensuring the website reduces downtime, and often handles issues with deployment.

• Technical Program Manager (TPM): The TPM often helps with the "how" of product development, including setting timelines and running meetings to reach milestones.

• Product Manager (PM): The PM helps with the "why" of product development, and helps with defining product requirements and deciding the priority of building features.

• Product Analyst: Product analysts view the user data of a product and create recommendations for the product team on priorities.

• QA Engineer: QA engineers test the finalized product to ensure there are minimal bugs and issues.

Product Terms

• A/B Test: A/B testing is a method of comparing two versions of a webpage or app against each other to determine which one performs better. Often, an A/B test will give 50% of users experience “A” and the other 50% experience “B.” Product managers often help choose which variant is better (“A” or “B”) based on metric analysis.

• Beta Test: A trial phase of the product's launch. This is usually scoped to a select group of early adopter users, and the product may still have bugs in it.

• CTR: stands for “clickthrough rate.” The percentage of people visiting a web page who access a hypertext link to a particular advertisement.

• Early Adopters: These users use the product as soon as it is available. These are often the product's most dedicated fans, and are likely to be beta testers.

• Low-hanging fruit: An easy product or feature change that can substantially improve metrics. For instance, adding a button to the homepage for users to purchase a product might be a "low-hanging fruit."

• Pain Point: A pain point is a problem that prospective customers or users are experiencing. Pain point identification is helpful to generate targeted solutions.

• ROI: Stands for return on investment.

• UI: User interface. This is the means by which the user and computing system interact. UI most often refers to the design of the application or website.

• Use case: A hypothetical scenario for how a user might interact with the product. Each use case generally outlines a particular value proposition to the user.

• UX: User experience. This is the overall experience of the user's use of the product. The user interface (UI) is often a part of the UX, but the user experience could include even more. For example, the user experience of booking a hotel on the phone might involve the pleasantness of the phone call or the reliability of the connection.

• Value proposition: Answers the question: How does this product add value to the end-user? What is the value of the product?