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."
#tech
34 entries
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."
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."
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."
Disrupt
To enter an industry you do not understand and add an app to it.
"We are disrupting laundry by making it a subscription you cannot cancel."
Thought leader
Someone who tweets opinions at 6 a.m. and calls it a career.
"He became a thought leader by being wrong loudly and early."
Growth hack
A trick to acquire users that works exactly once and ruins it for everyone.
"Our growth hack was emailing your entire contact list without asking. Bold."
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."
AI-powered
A label applied to any product containing at least one if-statement.
"It is AI-powered. The AI is an intern named Kyle answering chats."
Move fast and break things
A philosophy that works great until the thing you break is in production at 2 a.m.
"We moved fast and broke things. The things were customer payments."
Hustle
Doing the work of three people for the salary of one and posting about how grateful you are.
"Rise and hustle. I have not slept since Series A."
Web3
The same internet, now with extra steps and a wallet you will lose.
"We put it on Web3. Nobody can use it, but it is decentralized."
Visionary
A founder whose vision is consistently three years away and one round of funding short.
"He is a visionary, meaning the demo does not work yet but the keynote slaps."
MVP
Minimum Viable Product. The 10% of what you promised, shipped early and rebranded as lean.
"The MVP has one feature and three disclaimers."
Whiteboard
To draw boxes and arrows until everyone feels aligned and nobody is.
"We whiteboarded for an hour and left with a photo no one would read."
Onboarding
The brief honeymoon before the systems break you.
"Onboarding ended the moment someone added me to the on-call rotation."
Ecosystem
What you call a pile of tools that do not talk to each other.
"Our ecosystem has 14 apps and zero integrations."
Frictionless
Describing a process with at least six required steps.
"The frictionless signup needs a password, a code, and a small prayer."
Tech debt
Yesterday shortcut, now charging interest in production.
"We will fix the tech debt next quarter, said every quarter."
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."
Ship it
A battle cry uttered moments before the rollback.
"He said ship it, and the incident channel lit up like a holiday."
Hotfix
An emergency patch that fixes one thing and quietly breaks two.
"The hotfix worked, except for the part that took down checkout."
On call
A week of carrying a pager that exists solely to ruin your sleep.
"I was on call, which means my phone screamed at 3 a.m. for a typo."
Bleeding edge
Technology so new that you are the one who finds the bugs.
"We went bleeding edge and the bleeding was mostly ours."
Dogfooding
Using your own product and discovering exactly how bad it is.
"We started dogfooding and immediately filed forty bugs on ourselves."
Legacy code
Software written by someone who left, that everyone is afraid to touch.
"Do not touch the legacy code. We do not know what it does and neither did Greg."
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."
Funnel
A diagram showing how many people lose interest at every step.
"Our funnel is a cliff with one survivor at the bottom."
Async
A way of working that means I will reply whenever, possibly never.
"We are async, so my answer to your urgent question is coming next week."
Slack
To message someone three desks away instead of standing up.
"I slacked the guy next to me to ask if he wanted coffee."
POC
Proof Of Concept. A demo built overnight that leadership treats as a finished product.
"The POC worked once on my laptop, so naturally they sold it."
Pivot
Founder for the first idea did not work, please keep funding us.
"We pivoted from dog social network to enterprise dog social network."
Ping
To send a one-word message that demands a paragraph of context you did not provide.
"He pinged me with just hey and then went silent for an hour."