The evolution of Jargon during Product Building

Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/ralphpaglia/8316453365

Initially during conceiving a concept the terminology used to describe the entities, processes and methods are usually approximate. It all depends on the level of skill, knowledge and experience among the teams. As the concept gets clearer the appropriate and right items are identified and assigned. Sometimes a new non-existent technical or business or 'whatever-closely-resonates' terminology gets framed to address the immediate communication needs. This journey to attaining clarity and obtaining general acceptance is an interesting part of product building.

However, it results in interesting situations with categories of terms being used during communication though the intentions are benign

1. Misguiding terms – They are likely to convey the wrong requirement or the solution
2. Incorrect terms – They do not convey anything about the requirement or the solution
3. References – i.e. They convey part of the requirement or the solution

Misguiding Terms

Sometimes, the terms used by individuals or organizations can easily misguide regarding the actual requirement and the possible solution. In SaaS , there are On-prem (Customer Self-hosted and managed) and Cloud versions (Vendor hosted and maintained) of a Product. The engagement, delivery, pricing, billing and payments vary for each type. A customer wanted our application (Product) to interface with their two different systems

1. System 1 confined to the office called 'Ground System'
2. System 2 available anywhere over the internet through secure login called 'Cloud System'

Hence, during the initial scoping for the solution things that immediate struck us based the terms used by the customer were that

1. Ground System confined to the office i.e. it required On-Prem version of our product configured within a firewall
2. Cloud System available anywhere over the internet through secure login i.e. it required Cloud Version of our Product.

The support team mindset was also inclined to the same.

However, more elicitation sessions about the customer needs revealed an important additional need regarding strict data privacy. Hence we realized the right solution was that

1. Ground System confined to the office i.e. it required On-Prem version of our product configured within a firewall
2. Cloud System available anywhere over the internet through secure login i.e. It also required, an On-Prem version of our product configured to work outside a firewall

The additional data requirements completely switched the solution from Cloud version of our product to On-Prem version. Once I understood the significance I requested the customer as well as the teams to use alternate names for referring to these systems to avoid misleading others.

Incorrect Terms

Lack of Domain Knowledge

When we built a Product to watch movies online simultaneously along with theatrical release (Legally with permission from Owners, of course), we weren't quite sure about the product classification or rather the business classification. We would refer to the Product as a 'Movie Portal to watch new releases online' because we felt that was apt for marketing or conveying to a layman. However, this lack of appropriate term to convey our Product Offering or Classification limited our ability to conduct methodical competitor research. It was confined to our knowledge of existing products or conducting Google Searches along similar terms to our offering like 'Watch new movies online', 'Watch latest releases online' with majority of the results being Video Pirated sites. Only when we started pushing aggressively for Financial Partners we realized our product classification as 'Video on Demand' (VOD). From there it was much easier to discover different categories within this space like TVOD (Transaction Video on Demand), PPV VOD (Pay per View Video on Demand), OTT (Over the top content providers) meaning those using the internet as primary channel for content distribution instead of Satellite or Cable TV.

Action Thruster

Of course, there is a classic case of ones dreaded terms being used for something else by others. In our case it was the term Issue. The Engineering team was wired to the word 'issue' as a 'serious bug' in the software that demanded immediate action through analysis and releasing fixes. They would get anxious to what was the magnitude of the problem that escaped their attention in spite of thorough checks at multiple levels. However, the Product Manager insisted on using the word issue for everything universal - defect or an enhancement, in spite of pleading about the team's problem with that terminology. The Product Manager would argue that they didn't have time to analyze whether it was a 'bug' i.e. deviation from the expected behavior or an improvement to the existing. All that they needed was immediate action and hence used the term that would convey the same.

References

Matter of convenience

For IT it was 'CDN' (Content Delivery Network), Engineering referred to it as 'Video Player', Product Manager referred to it as 'Multi-Device Streaming'. The 3rd Party vendor we integrated covered all these technical and non-technical aspects through integration with partners for each and presented themselves as 'Business Video Hosting' . However, the terminology adopted by each team to refer the solution closely matched with those aspects to which close attention was paid or mattered most to them. Every time a discussion arose about that particular aspect I knew they were referring to Video Hosting solution.