Equity
a portion of ownership/share of ownership in a company.
""We are offering you a 5% Equity stake in the company in the form of stock options""
Onboarding
The brief honeymoon before the systems break you.
"Onboarding ended the moment someone added me to the on-call rotation."
Boss-hole
A manager whose open door policy mostly means open season on your calendar. Feedback arrives only as new problems.
"He booked a 4:30 Friday sync to ask why morale is low. Total boss-hole."
Scope creep
The slow, polite process by which a two-week task becomes your entire personality.
"It started as a logo tweak. Now I am rebranding the company and questioning my life."
Stand-up theater
A daily meeting where everyone performs productivity for nine minutes so no one has to do it for the other seven hours.
"I said no blockers for the fourth day straight. The blocker is me."
Gantt fantasy
A beautiful color-coded timeline that becomes fiction about twelve minutes after the kickoff meeting.
"According to the Gantt fantasy we shipped last Tuesday."
Parking lot
Where good ideas go to be politely euthanized during meetings.
"Great point, let us put that in the parking lot. The parking lot has no exit."
Quick sync
A meeting that is neither quick nor synchronized, scheduled because someone refused to read the thread.
"This quick sync has a slide deck and a pre-read."
Action item
A task assigned to whoever made eye contact last.
"I looked up at the wrong moment and now I own the migration."
Blocker
Officially an obstacle to progress. Unofficially the person you are waiting on who is also in this meeting claiming they have no blockers.
"My blocker is Dave. Dave just said he has no blockers. Dave is lying."
Retro
A meeting where the team agrees exactly what to fix, then does the same thing next sprint with renewed confidence.
"Third retro in a row we committed to better estimates."
Velocity
A made-up number the team agrees to believe in so leadership feels safe.
"We doubled our velocity by changing what a point means."
Definition of done
A sacred agreement about when work is finished, revised the instant work is finished.
"It met the definition of done until QA opened it."
Stakeholder
Anyone with enough opinions and no actual responsibility to derail your timeline.
"A stakeholder I have never met just vetoed the button color."
Kickoff
An optimistic ceremony held at the exact moment of maximum ignorance about the project.
"We set the deadline at the kickoff, before anyone knew anything."
Dependency
The reason it is not your fault, attached to the reason it is still your problem.
"Blocked by an upstream dependency owned by a team that got reorged out of existence."
Buffer
Padding added to an estimate, immediately spent by everyone who knows it is there.
"I built in a week of buffer. Marketing found it in an hour."
Re-prioritize
To drop everything for yesterday fire, which is now somehow less urgent than today fire.
"We re-prioritized so hard the roadmap is just a list of regrets."
Fast follow
A promise that the thing you cut to hit the deadline will return. It will not return.
"We will add it as a fast follow. That was eleven sprints ago."
War room
A meeting that escalates a minor outage into a spectator sport with snacks.
"Forty people in the war room watching one engineer fix a typo."