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."
#strategy
15 entries
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."
OKR
Objectives and Key Results. Goals ambitious enough to motivate and vague enough to never technically fail.
"We hit 0.7 on the OKR, which we are calling a win."
Deep dive
A meeting that promises depth and delivers a 60-slide skim.
"The deep dive into churn somehow never mentioned a single customer."
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."
Stretch goal
A target set so high that missing it is built into the plan.
"The stretch goal was 300%, so 90% is technically a disappointment."
Low-hanging fruit
The easy wins everyone claims and no one actually picks.
"We grabbed the low-hanging fruit, which is still hanging there."
Move the needle
To make a change so small only the deck notices.
"This initiative will move the needle, said the needle that never moved."
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."
Paradigm shift
A normal change described by someone who reads too many decks.
"He called a new spreadsheet a paradigm shift."
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."
North star
A guiding metric pointed at by everyone heading different directions.
"We aligned on a north star and then walked off four cliffs."
Table stakes
The bare minimum, described as if it were ambitious.
"Working software is table stakes, said the team without working software."
KPI
Key Performance Indicator. A number chosen because it is easy to make go up.
"We hit every KPI and somehow lost money."
Pivot
A graceful word for sprinting in the opposite direction of last quarter promise.
"We pivoted so hard the old roadmap got vertigo."