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Digital product management glossary
49 terms from R01, Digital product management — 24 defined in the guide itself and 25 more from the field around it. Every term the guide teaches links to the slide that teaches it.
R01 · Why build
Digital product management
What change in behaviour are we betting on?
Every term below is defined in the words of digital product management, guide R01 of craft guides for educational technologists, and opens the guide at the slide where it is taught. 25 of the 49 are the field’s vocabulary rather than the guide’s own: words a reader will meet around this subject, defined here because the guide assumes them. 2 terms are also defined by another guide in the series; where the two differ, both wordings are given. The whole craft glossary holds all of them together.
| Term | Definition | Referred to in | Read further |
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| B | |||
| Bet | A decision to spend effort on the expectation that it will change someone's behaviour in a useful way. It can lose. |
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| Beta phase | The stage of a public digital service in which a working version is built and opened to real users, first by invitation and then publicly, while it is still being improved. |
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| Build trap | Measuring success by outputs rather than outcomes (Perri, 2018). |
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| C | |||
| Churn rate | The share of users or customers who stop using a product in a given period. Its complement is the retention rate. |
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| Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software | Ready-made software bought or licensed from a supplier and configured for use, as opposed to software built to order. |
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| Cost of delay | What it costs, per unit of time, to have a piece of work not yet done. R10 What it costs to have a result or a feature later rather than sooner (Reinertsen, 2009). |
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| D | |||
| Delivery | The work of building and releasing something reliably. |
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| Discovery | The work of deciding whether something is worth building, using quick and cheap tests. |
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| Dual-track development | Running discovery and delivery as two parallel tracks, two kinds of work and two kinds of thinking, with ideas tested and settled ahead of the code that implements them (Patton, 2017). |
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| E | |||
| Empowered product team | A cross-functional team that is given a problem and an outcome to achieve, and the authority to decide the solution, in place of a list of features to build. |
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| F | |||
| Freemium | A pricing model in which a basic version of a product is free and users or institutions pay for further features, capacity or support. |
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| I | |||
| Impact | Long-term change in organisations, communities or systems, often years after the work. |
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| Input metric | A measure a team can move directly through its own work and which is believed to drive the north star metric. |
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| K | |||
| Kano model | A view of satisfaction as two-dimensional: must-be qualities anger users when absent and add little when present, while attractive qualities delight when present and are not missed when absent (Kano et al., 1984). |
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| Key performance indicator (KPI) | A measure an organisation tracks routinely to judge whether an activity is performing as intended, usually against a set target. |
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| L | |||
| Leading signal | A behaviour that moves within a planning cycle and plausibly moves before the result you want. |
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| Logic model | A chain that separates outputs, the direct products of activities, from outcomes, the changes in participants' behaviour, and impact, the change in organisations, communities or systems (W. K. Kellogg Foundation, 2004). |
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| M | |||
| Mandate | An instruction from an authority to deliver something, often framed as a solution. |
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| MoSCoW | A method that splits scope into must, should, could and won't, useful for fixed-date releases, with musts kept to no more than about 60% of effort (Clegg & Barker, 1994). |
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| N | |||
| North star metric | One metric chosen to represent the value a product delivers, supported by input metrics a team can move. |
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| Now, next, later roadmap | A roadmap with three time horizons instead of dates: work under way, work coming soon and work further out, with less detail and less certainty in each later column. |
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| O | |||
| Objectives and key results (OKRs) | A goal-setting format that pairs a qualitative objective with two to five measurable results showing whether it was reached, usually set each quarter. |
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| Opportunity | A need, pain point or desire that, if addressed, could move an outcome. R06 An insight turned into something to design for, usually written as a question. |
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| Opportunity solution tree | A map with the desired outcome at its root, the opportunity space of needs and pain points below it, then the solutions, each carrying small tests of its riskiest assumptions (Torres, 2021). |
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| Outcome | A change in someone's behaviour that leads towards the result you want. |
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| Output | Something a team produces: a feature, a release, a document. |
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| P | |||
| Power and interest grid | A grid that sorts stakeholders by how much they can affect a decision and how much they care about it (Mendelow, 1981). |
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| Product | Something maintained and improved over time by a stable team, judged by the outcomes it moves. |
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| Product life cycle | The stages a product passes through from introduction, through growth and maturity, to decline and retirement, each calling for different investment and different measures. |
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| Product manager | The person answerable for what a product team builds and why, who weighs user value against cost and the organisation's aims. Distinct from a project manager, who is answerable for schedule and budget. |
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| Product operating model | A way of organising technology work around long-lived teams that are given problems to solve and judged by outcomes, in place of projects that are handed features to deliver. |
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| Product operations (product ops) | The function that supports product managers with shared data, user-research logistics, tooling and common processes, so that teams spend their time on decisions. |
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| Product requirements document (PRD) | A document that sets out the problem a feature should solve, who it is for, what it must do and how success will be judged, written before the build begins. |
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| Product strategy | The sequence of problems a team chooses to solve, and those it chooses not to, in order to move from where the product is now towards its vision. |
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| Product trio | The product, design and engineering leads who run discovery together (Torres, 2021). |
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| Product vision | A short description of the future the product is meant to bring about for its users, usually three to ten years out, which gives the roadmap its direction. |
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| Product–market fit | The point at which a product meets a real need for a defined group well enough that they keep using it, recommend it and would miss it if it went. |
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| Project | Temporary work to deliver a defined scope by a date and within a budget. |
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| R | |||
| Request for proposal (RFP) | A document a buyer issues to invite suppliers to bid for a piece of work, setting out what is needed and how bids will be judged. |
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| RICE scoring | A prioritisation score of reach, impact and confidence multiplied together and divided by effort, useful for comparing many small items (McBride, 2018). |
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| Roadmap | A statement of intent and direction, ideally ordered by certainty rather than by date. |
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| S | |||
| Scope creep | The gradual, unplanned growth of what a piece of work is expected to deliver, without matching changes to time, budget or people. |
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| Solutionism | The habit of recasting complex social situations as neat problems with technical fixes (Morozov, 2013). |
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| Stage-gate process | A way of running product development as a fixed series of stages, each ending in a review at which managers approve, stop or send back the work. |
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| Sunk cost fallacy | The tendency to keep investing in something because of what has already been spent on it, although that money or effort cannot be recovered whatever is decided next. |
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| T | |||
| Total cost of ownership (TCO) | The full cost of a product over its life, adding training, support, integration, maintenance and eventual replacement to the purchase or licence price. |
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| V | |||
| Value proposition | A statement of the benefit a product offers a particular group of users, and why they should choose it over what they do now. |
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| Vendor lock-in | A position in which moving away from a supplier's product would cost so much, in data migration, retraining or contract penalties, that the buyer stays whatever the price or quality. |
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| W | |||
| Weighted shortest job first (WSJF) | A way of ordering work by dividing each item's cost of delay by its duration, so that short, valuable jobs are done first. |
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