Actionable Insights
Raw data tweaked and tortured until it agrees with the decision leadership already made.
Metrics & Marketing
frAGILE™ / Department of Corporate Terminology
The Dictionary.
100 corporate terms, translated into the language of organizational survival. The official unofficial guide to everything we say when nobody wants to explain what actually happened.
Showing all 100 terms.
Agile
A flexible way of working, commonly implemented as a rigid calendar of ceremonies for discussing why the flexible work cannot change.
Product & Strategy
Alignment
The thirty-second period when everyone agrees on a direction before returning to their departments with five different interpretations of it.
Meetings & Governance
Architecture
The structural foundation expected to survive every new strategy while remaining firmly outside this quarter's scope.
Engineering & Delivery
Artifact
A document created to prove that a conversation happened, usually moments before another meeting is scheduled to discuss the document.
Meetings & Governance
Asynchronous (Async)
A communication method designed to let people respond on their own schedule, followed approximately eleven minutes later by, "Just checking if you saw this."
Meetings & Governance
Backlog
A digital graveyard of low-priority bug reports, minor feature requests, and abandoned dreams that no sprint will ever touch.
Product & Strategy
Bake-off
Two teams asked to prove which approach is better, usually after the preferred approach has already appeared in the executive deck.
Engineering & Delivery
Bandwidth
Your remaining mental capacity to tolerate another meeting that could have been a three-sentence email.
Metrics & Marketing
Benchmark
Studying competitors to understand the market, shortly before rebuilding the exact feature everyone agreed was mediocre.
Product & Strategy
Bespoke
A custom fix for one important customer, quietly promoted to a permanent problem for everyone else.
Product & Strategy
Capacity Planning
The careful allocation of 100 percent of a team's available time before accounting for meetings, support, defects, dependencies, emergencies, or reality.
Meetings & Governance
Change Management
The organizational discipline of preparing people for a change they usually discover from the new interface on Monday morning.
Meetings & Governance
Circle Back
A polite tactic used to end a conversation you have zero intention of ever resuming.
Meetings & Governance
Core Competency
The thing an organization is unusually good at, generally receiving less investment than the new thing mentioned during the latest executive offsite.
Product & Strategy
Customer-Centric
A commitment to placing customers at the center of every decision, except decisions involving deadlines, budgets, sales commitments, architecture, or executive preference.
Product & Strategy
Dark Pattern
Designing a user interface so intentionally confusing that canceling a subscription requires a phone call and a notary public.
Product & Strategy
Deep Dive
Spending two hours analyzing a microscopic edge case while the core application actively burns down.
Meetings & Governance
Deliverable
A tangible output demonstrating progress, frequently confused with progress itself.
Meetings & Governance
Dependency
Something another team must finish before you can finish your work, ensuring that neither team's delivery date can ever be discussed with confidence.
Engineering & Delivery
Discovery
The disciplined process of learning what should be built before building it, ideally conducted before everyone has already decided what will be built.
Product & Strategy
Dogfooding
Using your own product internally to experience exactly what customers experience, followed by explaining why the internal experience is somehow different.
Engineering & Delivery
Ecosystem
A collection of separate, poorly connected software products sold as a unified suite.
Engineering & Delivery
Edge Case
A user behavior considered statistically insignificant until the user experiencing it is sufficiently important.
Product & Strategy
Empowerment
Giving a team total autonomy to make decisions, provided those decisions align perfectly with the CEO's gut feeling.
Meetings & Governance
Epic
A Jira ticket so vaguely defined and massive in scope that it slowly swallows three consecutive quarters of roadmap space.
Engineering & Delivery
Escalation
The formal process of adding progressively more senior people to an unresolved problem until the original problem becomes secondary.
Meetings & Governance
ETA (Estimated Time of Arrival)
A date requested before enough information exists to provide a date, and therefore provided anyway.
Engineering & Delivery
Feature Creep
The gradual addition of individually reasonable requests until a simple application requires a flight manual.
Product & Strategy
Firefight
Urgent work performed to resolve an emergency while postponing the non-urgent work intended to prevent future emergencies.
Engineering & Delivery
Flywheel
A circular diagram in a presentation slide used to make a basic sales loop sound like physics.
Product & Strategy
Frictionless
A marketing claim applied to a checkout flow that currently requires three redirects, SMS verification, and a password reset.
Metrics & Marketing
Gap Analysis
A structured comparison between where your product is and where everyone suddenly remembers they wanted it to be.
Product & Strategy
Go-To-Market (GTM)
The coordinated effort by Product, Sales, Marketing, Operations, and Support to discover they each had a different launch date.
Meetings & Governance
Governance
A collection of meetings, approvals, committees, and decision rights created to ensure important decisions are made deliberately, eventually, or elsewhere.
Meetings & Governance
Graceful Degradation
A system's ability to fail politely while the incident channel becomes considerably less polite.
Engineering & Delivery
Greenfield
A clean slate on which to rebuild the same approval process that made the previous system impossible to change.
Engineering & Delivery
Hard Stop
A polite meeting exit tactic used to escape an unproductive call five minutes before your next unproductive call.
Meetings & Governance
Headwinds
Conditions outside the organization's control. Frequently discovered near the end of a difficult quarter.
Meetings & Governance
Heuristic
A practical rule of thumb used when perfect information is unavailable, later presented in PowerPoint with sufficient confidence to resemble perfect information.
Meetings & Governance
HiPPO (Highest Paid Person's Opinion)
The ultimate decision-making framework that overrides all user research, A/B testing, and logical reasoning.
Meetings & Governance
Impact
The measurable difference created by an initiative, usually described most enthusiastically before anyone agrees how it will be measured.
Product & Strategy
Incremental
Shipping in small increments, each celebrated as a major milestone until somebody asks whether the destination has changed.
Product & Strategy
Intake
A structured process for receiving unstructured requests from people who have already promised them to someone.
Engineering & Delivery
Iterative
Improving something through repeated cycles, assuming the second cycle survives the roadmap.
Product & Strategy
Jira
A system for making work visible by transforming human effort into rectangles.
Engineering & Delivery
Job To Be Done (JTBD)
A useful way of understanding what customers are actually trying to accomplish, occasionally expanded until understanding the framework becomes its own job to be done.
Product & Strategy
Kicking the Can
Postponing the same critical fix until its original estimate qualifies as historical documentation.
Engineering & Delivery
KPI (Key Performance Indicator)
A metric considered important enough to appear on an executive dashboard and stable enough to be redefined when necessary.
Meetings & Governance
Lean
The elimination of waste from a process, sometimes enthusiastically extended to include staffing.
Meetings & Governance
Legacy Code
Software everyone wants to replace, provided the replacement causes no downtime, costs nothing, and was finished last quarter.
Engineering & Delivery
Low-Hanging Fruit
Easy tasks that have been ignored for so long they are now rotting at the bottom of the backlog.
Meetings & Governance
Market Validation
Evidence that customers actually want something, ideally obtained from customers who are neither relatives nor currently employed by the company.
Product & Strategy
Microservices
Dividing one application into independently deployable services, then creating a standing committee to coordinate their independence.
Engineering & Delivery
MoSCoW Method
A prioritization tool where stakeholders label 95% of items as "Must Haves" and ignore the remaining letters.
Product & Strategy
MVP (Minimum Viable Product)
The smallest version capable of testing a meaningful assumption, frequently interpreted as the smallest version everyone can tolerate apologizing for.
Product & Strategy
No-Code
Software that allows people to create applications without traditional programming, thereby moving several traditional programming problems somewhere less visible.
Engineering & Delivery
Non-Negotiable
A surprise feature request introduced at 4:30 PM on a Friday by an executive who saw a demo video on LinkedIn.
Meetings & Governance
North Star Metric
The single measure intended to orient the organization toward long-term value, supported by approximately 47 additional measures.
Product & Strategy
Offboarding
A carefully documented departure process that discovers the departing employee owns half the team's automations.
Meetings & Governance
Offsite
A meeting held somewhere expensive enough that ordinary meetings briefly feel strategic.
Meetings & Governance
OKR (Objectives & Key Results)
A framework connecting ambitious goals to measurable outcomes, traditionally rediscovered near the end of each quarter.
Meetings & Governance
Organic Growth
Growth achieved without marketing spend, not counting the founder personally messaging the entire internet.
Product & Strategy
Pain Point
A genuine customer problem that becomes progressively more dramatic as it moves closer to a sales presentation.
Product & Strategy
Parity
Rebuilding every mediocre feature your competitor has so users can be equally disappointed by your platform.
Product & Strategy
Pivot
A strategic change in direction made after new evidence emerges, or immediately before old evidence becomes impossible to ignore.
Product & Strategy
Post-Mortem
A structured examination of what went wrong, conducted in a psychologically safe environment where everyone already knows exactly what went wrong.
Meetings & Governance
Proof of Concept (PoC)
A temporary experiment created solely to demonstrate feasibility and therefore naturally considered for production.
Engineering & Delivery
QBR (Quarterly Business Review)
A four-hour meeting where leaders present 80-slide decks to peers who are secretly clearing their email inboxes.
Meetings & Governance
Quality Assurance (QA)
The systematic effort to discover whether software behaves as intended before customers perform the same research independently.
Engineering & Delivery
RACI Matrix
A matrix that assigns responsibility, accountability, consultation, and information so precisely that nobody is quite sure who can say yes.
Meetings & Governance
Readiness
The organizational condition achieved immediately before discovering three things nobody realized were required.
Meetings & Governance
Refactor
Improving the internal structure of software without changing its external behavior, making it simultaneously essential to engineering and nearly invisible to everyone funding it.
Engineering & Delivery
Retrospective (Retro)
A recurring meeting dedicated to identifying how the team can improve, including several improvements first identified during the previous retrospective.
Engineering & Delivery
Roadmap
A colorful visual timeline of promised features that will be completely rearranged by next Tuesday morning.
Product & Strategy
Scope Creep
The quiet, steady expansion of a project's requirements until a simple patch turns into a complete system rebuild.
Product & Strategy
Silo
An organizational boundary that functions perfectly until a customer needs two departments to solve the same problem.
Meetings & Governance
Single Source of Truth
The authoritative location for information, alongside the spreadsheet, Slack thread, PowerPoint, Jira ticket, SharePoint page, and copy someone saved locally.
Meetings & Governance
Spike
A time-boxed investigation intended to reduce uncertainty, occasionally concluding with a professionally documented increase in uncertainty.
Engineering & Delivery
Sprint
A fixed period for completing selected work, followed by another fixed period containing some remarkably familiar selected work.
Engineering & Delivery
Stakeholder
Anyone whose input is essential, whose priorities are urgent, and whose decision rights remain under active discussion.
Product & Strategy
Synergy
The predicted benefit of working together, most reliably observed in PowerPoint before the teams have met.
Meetings & Governance
T-Shirt Sizing
Estimating complex work using clothing sizes so everyone can disagree about effort without becoming distracted by numbers.
Meetings & Governance
Technical Debt
The future cost created by today's expedient technical decisions, making it one of the few forms of debt routinely approved without a repayment schedule.
Engineering & Delivery
Thought Leadership
The public sharing of expertise and original thinking, plus several observations about leadership that were previously available on coffee mugs.
Metrics & Marketing
Traction
Getting three sign-ups in a week and using exponential trendlines to project a billion-dollar valuation by Q4.
Metrics & Marketing
Unblock
To remove an obstacle preventing progress, commonly accomplished by scheduling a meeting with the person who did not answer the message.
Engineering & Delivery
Unicorn
A privately held startup valued above one billion dollars, proving that mythical creatures can, under certain market conditions, have capitalization tables.
Metrics & Marketing
User Story
A concise description of user value written in ordinary language before acquiring fourteen acceptance criteria and three technical dependencies.
Product & Strategy
UX (User Experience)
The discipline of making a product intuitive until seventeen non-negotiable requirements arrive from six departments.
Product & Strategy
Value Add
Extra features thrown into a contract for free because the customer threatened to switch to a competitor.
Product & Strategy
Value Proposition
The compelling reason customers should choose the product, polished until everyone can recite it and nobody can explain it.
Product & Strategy
Velocity
A measure of how much work a team completes over time, most useful until somebody decides it should become a target.
Product & Strategy
Water-Scrum-Fall
Quarterly commitments at the top, two-week sprints in the middle, and a release train that still waits for permission to leave the station.
Engineering & Delivery
White Paper
An authoritative industry report whose final finding is that you should enter your corporate email address.
Metrics & Marketing
WIP (Work in Progress)
A permanent state of existence for seven different features that will sit 90% complete for the next six months.
Engineering & Delivery
X-Functional (Cross-Functional)
Gathering eight people from different departments in a room to guarantee that no single person has authority to make a decision.
Meetings & Governance
YOY (Year-Over-Year)
The growth comparison metric you switch to when your Month-Over-Month numbers look terrifying.
Metrics & Marketing
Zero-Day
A previously unknown security vulnerability for which no fix yet exists, traditionally discovered at the exact moment everyone responsible becomes unavailable.
Engineering & Delivery
Zombie Ticket
A Jira issue that was closed six months ago, only to be reopened by an angry user on a Saturday morning.
Engineering & Delivery
Nothing in the backlog.
Try another term or clear the filters. This time, the scope can change.
Important, apparently
The dictionary is satire. Your mileage is billable.
These definitions caricature organizational habits, not every person working inside them. If one sounds painfully familiar, please take it up with the appropriate steering committee.