“words matter” — business jargon heard round the office, a near-complete series

The following is a series of words from the bowels of every technology company in 2018. You won’t find “synergy” here. That one is far too mainstream and well-understood as bullshit at this point. These are the deep cuts, my dogs. As Pusha T would say, if you know you know.

Phrase #1: “Moving the cheese” — referring to taking a feature or piece of functionality and removing or altering it, usually without much advance notice to the customer.

Ex. “When we GA the new Widget Maker in place of the old Widget Maker, customers are going to want to know why we moved their cheese.”

Phrase #2: “Action item” – a set of outcomes or objectives (usually assignments to members of the group) resulting from a meeting that lasted longer than it should have. See also: “next steps”.

Ex. “So folks, action items from the meeting: Jane is going to get that list of things we need for the quarterlies together; Mo is going to revise the spreadsheet to indicate the change in process; and Shaun, you’re going to delegate something to someone else.”

Phrase #3: “Level set” – often used at the outset of follow-up sales calls (see previous post regarding “action items” and/or “next steps”) to indicate that an agenda is about to come out of someone’s mouth. All about moving on to yet more next steps.

Ex. “So, Suresh, thanks so much for taking the time to speak with us. Just to level set, on our last call you were really happy with our solutions, just havin’ some questions about our coverage in the Java area. We have with us today our top Guru, our top Ninja, who can help answer all those questions and probably show you some solutions.”

Phrase #4: “sync up” – an effort to discuss and ‘level set’ around a particular topic. Usually can be done via email; almost always done in a scheduled meeting. See also: “align,” “hash out,” “suss out.” Often used as a noun.

Ex. “You got time for a quick sync up around 11? I wanted to hash out a few items around our pricing for Q3 — fiscal Q3, that is!”

Phrase #5: “dot-one release” – a follow-on release to the current product that is being actively developed. Often used to demarcate a set of minor improvements, and almost always used as a way to avoid keeping a small but important feature out of scope. See also: “point-one,” “one-dot-one.”

Ex. “Well, I can definitely see how the commenting feature would be important for collaboration, particularly in siloed teams, but I don’t see that as a first release. That’s a one-dot-one for sure. [everyone nods vigorously]”

Phrase #6: “single throat to choke” – the concept of assigning responsibility for the success or — more notably — the failure of a particular project to a single party; a title usually given to some poor sap who has no idea he’s about to lose his job.

Ex. “During sprint planning, we decided that our product owner would be Gary. He’ll be responsible for what’s in and out of scope, as well as for defining our MVP that needs to be shipped this quarter. The organization is really happy with this outcome, because it gives us a single throat to choke. Go get em, Gary!”

Phrase #7: “the net of it is…” – a phrase used to sum up the outcome of a particular series of decisions and actions taken, particularly with regard to the outcome of a project. See also: “net-net”, “to review”, “at the end of the day”.

Ex. “We’re cutting scope on Features A, B, and C, which will allow the team to deliver our new product by February 28th. At the end of the day, the net of it is that we won’t be addressing our enterprise segment as holistically as we would have hoped to during our initial roadmap planning in Q1.”

Phrase #8: “sandbagging” – a term typically ascribed to engineers and their managers, signifying that an estimate provided for a given project or feature is disproportionately large relative to the actual effort. Often, those accusing said engineer or manager of ‘sandbagging’ have no means for validating their accusation. See also: “battleshipping”.

Ex. “Albert says that it’s going to take him 3 weeks to do the upgrade to Rails 4.2, but he’s totally sandbagging. It can’t POSSIBLY take that long to do a simple upgrade!”

Phrase #9: “touch” – a way of describing direct customer interaction and outreach. Often used alongside modifiers like “low” or “high,” and often used by sales and/or marketing to illustrate their approach to customer service. Very hard to not giggle when someone says this in a meeting.

Ex. “We’re really looking to increase customer engagement this year through a more high-touch sales model. This means we’ll be spending a lot more time actually reaching out to customers proactively, especially in cases where we’ve identified a high churn risk. It’s important that we touch our customers at least once a week.”

Phrase #10: “rockstar” – a hard worker, a go-getter, an over-achiever. Someone who really “goes the extra mile” and “swims outside their lane” and really “hits all the right notes” by “operating at the right level” and effectively puts on for their company against all odds. Often very positive and frustratingly optimistic through the darkest of times. Possible emotional attachment to their career. See also: “a-plus performer”.

Ex. “One word comes to mind when we think of Sarah: rockstar.”

Phrase #11: “double click” – to pause a meeting, particularly during a presentation where the presenter requested that all questions be left for the end of said presentation, in order to discuss a specific item. Typically used by highly-paid professionals who aren’t quite sure what their job is. See also: “drill down,” “zero in,” “dive deeper,” “take a closer look at”.

Ex. “Sorry, can we pause for just a moment? I want to double click on those growth numbers you just put up there — seems like we might be a bit out of alignment on the exact revenue expectations for FY17.”