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."
#jargon
30 entries
Pro forma
Numbers describing a future that exists only in the deck.
"The pro forma has us at a billion in revenue by a year that keeps moving."
Haircut
A polite word for the money you were promised getting noticeably shorter.
"The valuation took a haircut. It is basically bald now."
10x engineer
A developer ten times as productive and ten times as impossible to work with.
"Our 10x engineer rewrote everything in a language only he can read."
Touch base
To schedule a meeting about a thing that could have been a sentence.
"Let us touch base on the email I have not opened yet."
Sidebar
A meeting inside a meeting, held to avoid the meeting you are in.
"Can we take that to a sidebar, meaning can two of us escape."
Take this offline
A polite way to say this conversation is embarrassing in front of leadership.
"Great question, let us take this offline and then never discuss it."
Deep dive
What a manager calls reading the first paragraph out loud.
"He did a deep dive, by which he means he opened the doc on the call."
Per my last email
Four words that mean I already told you and now I have proof.
"Per my last email, as in scroll up and read what you ignored."
Looping in
Adding more people to an email so the blame has somewhere to spread.
"Looping in the whole team so this becomes a group failure."
Gentle reminder
A threat wearing a cardigan.
"Just a gentle reminder, which is the third one and not gentle."
Out of pocket
I will be unreachable and emotionally unavailable.
"I am out of pocket next week, meaning do not find me."
Circling back
Returning to a topic everyone hoped had quietly died.
"Circling back on this, said the email reviving a corpse."
Low-hanging fruit
The easy wins everyone claims and no one actually picks.
"We grabbed the low-hanging fruit, which is still hanging there."
Boil the ocean
To attempt everything at once and accomplish a warm puddle.
"Let us not boil the ocean, said the team boiling the ocean."
Best practice
What we do because someone else did it once and wrote a blog about it.
"It is best practice, meaning nobody remembers why we do it."
Core competency
The one thing a company does well, cited while it does ten things badly.
"Our core competency is focus, said the company with nine new products."
Holistic
A word that makes vague sound thoughtful.
"We need a holistic approach, meaning we have no specific plan."
Table stakes
The bare minimum, described as if it were ambitious.
"Working software is table stakes, said the team without working software."
Refactor
To rewrite working code until it is broken in newer, more elegant ways.
"I refactored the module and now nothing works but it is clean."
Hotfix
An emergency patch that fixes one thing and quietly breaks two.
"The hotfix worked, except for the part that took down checkout."
Stand up
To create a server, app, or environment that will immediately fall down.
"We stood up a new service and it sat right back down."
Quick fix
A temporary solution destined to become a permanent feature.
"The quick fix from 2019 is now load-bearing infrastructure."
Close
To finally get a yes after the customer stopped reading your emails.
"I am about to close, said the deal that has been about to close all quarter."
Upsell
To sell someone more of the thing they have not figured out yet.
"He tried to upsell me the premium tier of a product I cannot log into."
Touchpoint
Any contact with a customer, counted obsessively in a spreadsheet.
"We logged 12 touchpoints and still lost the deal."
Warm lead
A prospect who once clicked an email and now lives in your CRM forever.
"This warm lead has been warming since 2021."
Watercooler
The mythical place where culture allegedly happens.
"Remote work killed the watercooler, so now culture is a Slack channel nobody reads."
Circle back
To revisit a topic with the full intention of forgetting it again.
"Let us circle back next week, the polite burial of a good idea."
Circle back
A verbal placeholder for I am not dealing with this right now.
"He circled back so many times the topic got dizzy."