Business terms, without the business-school fog.

The work of bringing a new customer or user to the product.

For a designer: A clearer promise, trial, or sign-up journey can improve acquisition without buying more advertising.

The moment a new user first receives the product’s intended value.

For a designer: Define the useful action—not merely account creation—that shows the person has reached value.

The recurring subscription revenue a business expects over one year. It excludes one-time fees.

Simple calculation: Monthly recurring revenue × 12

For a designer: Use it to express the recurring revenue protected or created by a product decision.

A chain of effects that pushes a system back toward a limit or stable state.

For a designer: A conversion gain may create more support demand, which slows service and limits further growth.

A market space shaped around new demand rather than direct competition on familiar features and price.

For a designer: It usually requires removing accepted category conventions, not simply adding more features.

The level of sales at which money coming in equals all money going out, so the business stops losing money.

Simple calculation: Fixed costs ÷ contribution margin per customer

For a designer: Faster time to value and lower cost to serve bring break-even closer.

How much cash a company spends beyond what it earns during a period, usually one month.

For a designer: It sets the time available to learn before the company must raise money, cut costs, or earn more.

A product sold to another company rather than directly to an individual customer.

For a designer: The buyer, approver, administrator, and daily user may be different people, so the experience must support each role.

When a new offer takes customers or revenue from an existing offer from the same company.

For a designer: A migration can weaken today’s business while protecting the company from a stronger outside threat.

The gap between when a company earns money and when it actually receives it, compared with when its bills are due.

For a designer: Simpler checkout, upfront billing, and fewer payment failures bring cash in sooner.

The share of customers or recurring revenue lost during a period.

Simple calculation: Customers lost during the period ÷ customers at the start of the period

For a designer: Study why people leave, fail to renew, or reduce usage—not only why new users sign up.

A group of customers who started in the same period, tracked together over time.

For a designer: Compare cohorts before and after a design change to see whether new customers stay better than older ones.

A range used to show how uncertain an estimate is, rather than presenting one number as certain.

For a designer: Show a range when a prediction influences money, access, or human work, and change the experience when uncertainty grows.

Sending a case down a different path according to how certain the system is, such as asking a person to review uncertain cases.

For a designer: Set thresholds from observed consequences and make sure people can still reach help when the confidence signal is wrong.

What remains from a sale after the costs caused directly by that sale are removed.

Simple calculation: Revenue − variable costs

For a designer: Support effort, fulfilment, refunds, and AI usage can make a popular journey economically weak.

Correlation means two things move together; causation means one actually makes the other happen.

For a designer: Heavy users of a feature may stay longer because they were already committed. Use a fair test to show cause.

The direct cost of delivering what was sold. In software this may include hosting, AI usage, support, and payment fees.

For a designer: A flow that creates retries or human intervention can increase this cost.

The average amount spent to win one new customer, including relevant sales and marketing costs.

Simple calculation: Sales and marketing cost ÷ new customers

For a designer: Positioning, proof, referrals, and self-serve onboarding can reduce the effort needed to win a customer.

A survey measure of how satisfied customers are with an interaction or experience.

For a designer: Read the distribution and comments as well as the average; severe failures can disappear inside a healthy mean.

A contract describing how one organisation processes and protects personal data for another.

For a designer: Data collection, retention, export, and deletion choices can create obligations that affect the product journey.

A new product that starts out worse on the attributes an established leader competes on, but is cheaper, simpler, or reaches people who bought nothing before — and improves until it takes the leader's market. Described by Clayton Christensen in The Innovator's Dilemma.

For a designer: It usually means shipping deliberately less. If your plan is to match the leader feature for feature at a higher price, that is sustaining innovation, not disruption.

A mathematical way for an AI system to place related ideas near each other, even when they use different words.

For a designer: They often support semantic search and retrieval, adding cost and possible relevance errors to an AI experience.

A saved collection of representative cases used to compare product or model quality after a change.

For a designer: Include common journeys, edge cases, languages, and high-cost failures so an average score does not hide harm.

A simple scale of how strong a belief is: opinion, signal, behaviour, experiment, business result.

For a designer: Label each assumption with its rung and propose the cheapest test that moves it up one step.

The difference between what a forecast predicted and what actually happened.

For a designer: Show uncertainty and error ranges when a prediction triggers money, access, inventory, or human work.

A strategy exercise that asks what an offer should remove, reduce, improve, and create compared with existing choices.

For a designer: Use it to make the product genuinely different through subtraction as well as new features.

The stages people move through from first hearing about a product to trying, buying, and continuing to use it.

For a designer: A drop between two stages shows where to investigate, but it does not explain why people leave.

The route through which a chosen customer discovers, trusts, tries, buys, and recommends a product.

For a designer: The message, channel, proof, trial, and sales experience form one connected journey.

The rules, reviews, and people with authority to guide a decision or stop it when risk becomes too high.

For a designer: For a risky feature, make clear who reviews evidence, who can pause release, and how concerns are escalated.

The percentage of revenue left after direct delivery costs are removed.

Simple calculation: (Revenue − direct variable costs) ÷ revenue

For a designer: It reveals whether more usage creates room to grow or creates a larger cost problem.

A way of describing demand as the progress a person is trying to make in a situation, rather than as a customer profile or a feature request.

For a designer: Write it as: when [situation], I want to [motivation], so I can [outcome]. It names the real competitor, which is often a spreadsheet or doing nothing.

An estimate of the gross profit earned from an average customer over the whole relationship.

Simple calculation: Monthly revenue × gross margin ÷ monthly churn rate

For a designer: Retention and expansion can raise this value; poor onboarding or recurring friction can lower it.

The portion of the serviceable market the team can realistically win in the next few years.

For a designer: It should reflect sales capacity, product readiness, geography, and credible customer behavior.

How recurring revenue from the same customer group changes after upgrades, downgrades, and cancellations.

Simple calculation: (Starting revenue + expansion − downgrades − lost revenue) ÷ starting revenue

For a designer: It shows whether the existing experience creates enough value to retain and expand accounts.

How long the gross profit from a customer takes to recover the cost of winning that customer.

Simple calculation: Customer acquisition cost ÷ monthly gross profit per customer

For a designer: A long payback period means the company must fund growth for longer before it earns the money back.

The ability to raise price without losing enough customers to make the increase harmful.

For a designer: Distinct value, trust, workflow depth, and costly alternatives can create pricing power.

Strong evidence that a defined market repeatedly chooses, uses, and values the product.

For a designer: Positive interviews alone are not enough; look for retention, repeated use, willingness to pay, and disappointment if removed.

A chain of effects in which a change feeds more change in the same direction.

For a designer: More sellers can attract more buyers, which attracts still more sellers; the same pattern can also amplify failure.

A formal document in which a buyer asks suppliers to explain how they would meet stated requirements and at what price.

For a designer: RFP criteria reveal what enterprise buyers compare, but they may also preserve assumptions your product intends to challenge.

A comparison between the benefit created by an investment and what that investment cost.

Simple calculation: (Benefit − cost) ÷ cost

For a designer: Separate cash saved or earned from less certain benefits such as estimated time saved.

The usual shape of a technology or product's improvement over time: slow at first, then rapid, then flattening as further gains get expensive.

For a designer: Where you sit on the curve decides what wins — proof of value at the bottom, distribution in the middle, and switching costs plus a search for the next curve at the top.

An independent audit of controls related to areas such as security, availability, and confidentiality at a service organisation.

For a designer: Enterprise features, evidence, and operating practices may be required before a buyer can approve the product.

The part of the total market the current product and business can actually serve.

For a designer: Product constraints, language, regulation, geography, integrations, and sales reach all narrow it.

Software that customers access online and usually pay for through a recurring subscription.

For a designer: Retention, ongoing support, and the cost of serving customers matter because the relationship continues after the first sale.

A result chosen in advance that tells a team to stop, pause, or change an uncertain project. It is sometimes called a kill criterion.

For a designer: Agreeing on the condition before launch makes it easier to respond honestly when evidence is disappointing.

A misleading conclusion caused by studying only the people or products that remained visible and ignoring those that left or failed.

For a designer: Include churned, rejected, and unsuccessful users in research instead of learning only from enthusiastic customers.

An improvement that makes an existing product better for the customers a company already serves and competes on the axes the market already values.

For a designer: Most planned product improvements are sustaining, and that is fine—but assume a strong established competitor can copy them, so plan an advantage that lasts longer.

The money, time, risk, retraining, or lost data a customer faces when changing to an alternative.

For a designer: Useful workflow fit can create healthy switching costs; traps and blocked exports create harmful lock-in.

The total possible demand if every relevant customer could be served.

For a designer: Treat it as context, not a sales target; it is normally much larger than the reachable opportunity.

The revenue and direct costs attached to one useful unit, such as a customer, order, or resolved ticket.

For a designer: Choose a unit that matches how value and cost actually move through the experience.

A cost that rises when more customers use or buy the product.

For a designer: AI requests, payment fees, delivery, storage, and human review are common product-linked examples.

A search method that finds content with a similar meaning instead of looking only for the exact same words.

For a designer: It can improve discovery while introducing retrieval mistakes, latency, and cost that need visible recovery paths.