Product Management Cheat Sheet
Glossary of Product Management Terms.
Came across this list of Product management related terms. Thought it would be nice for anyone to have a ready list of vocab around product management stuff so that they all speak the same language. This is a Work in progress. Feel free to add you recommendations in the comments and I’ll be more than happy to add them to the list. Thanks for stopping by!
A/B Test: A/B testing is a method of comparing two versions of a webpage or app against each other to determine which one performs better. Often, an A/B test will give 50% of users experience “A” and the other 50% experience “B.” Product managers often help choose which variant is better (“A” or “B”) based on metric analysis.
API: Stands for Application Programming Interface. A product’s API extends the functionality of the product to other parties. For instance, a Facebook API might allow other products (like Venmo) use Facebook log-in to authenticate users.
Beta Test: A trial phase of the product’s launch. This is usually scoped to a select group of early adopter users, and the product may still have bugs in it.
Bounce Rate: The percentage of visitors to a particular website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page.
Conversion Rate: The percentage of visitors to a particular website who complete a desired goal (e.g. pay for a service)
Churn Rate: The percentage rate at which customers unsubscribe or don’t retain as users of a feature or product.
CLTV: Customer Lifetime Value (CLV or CLTV) is the average revenue you can generate from customers over the entire lifetime of their account. (Thanks Sai Gopalakrishnan for the submission)
CTR: stands for “clickthrough rate.” The percentage of people visiting a web page who access a hypertext link to a particular advertisement.
Customer Segment: Customer segmentation is the process of dividing customers into groups based on common characteristics so companies can market to each group effectively and appropriately.
DAU/MAU: Stands for daily active users or monthly active users. DAU and MAU are metrics used to determine how many users are using a product on a regular basis. For instance, a daily active user describes a user that uses a product on a daily basis. Generally, companies want high DAU/MAU metrics.
Dogfood: Using a product internally to test it before publicly releasing it. One might dogfood a new Google Maps feature (just have the Google Maps team use it to test it out) before launching it into beta mode.
Early Adopters: These users use the product as soon as it is available. These are often the product’s most dedicated fans, and are likely to be beta testers.
Four in a Box: Aligning UX, UI, PM, Backend teams, as defined here. (Thanks SoulofValerius31for the suggested addition. )
Go-to-market Strategy: The launch plan for a product. Consider this the blueprint for delivering the product from the company into the users’ hands.
Heatmaps: A heat map is a data visualization technique that shows magnitude of a phenomenon as color in two dimensions. The variation in color may be by hue or intensity, giving obvious visual cues to the reader about how the phenomenon is clustered or varies over space. (Thanks Abhishek Vatsa for the submission)
Impression: An instance of a pop-up or other Web advertisement being seen on computer users’ screens.
KPI: Stands for Key Performance Indicator. Quantifiable measure of a company’s objective (e.g. KPI for growth might be an increased number of DAUs)
Low-hanging fruit: An easy product or feature change that can substantially improve metrics. For instance, adding a button to the homepage for users to purchase a product might be a “low-hanging fruit.”
Mobile Web / Native: “Native” often refers to apps downloaded to a smartphone or computer. Web apps are those that are accessed via a URL. For instance, the Facebook app is a native app. The Facebook.com on a mobile Google Chrome browser in one’s smartphone is on the mobile web platform.
MVP: stands for minimum viable product. A product that only delivers the core, bare-bones functionality of your final product. An MVP is useful to get an initial sampling of user feedback. For example, Airbnb’s MVP might be an editable spreadsheet that hosts and guests can use to match up with each other for vacations.
North Star Metric: The single metric that best captures the success of your product. Of course, no metric will tell a full story, but the north star metric is the top, most important metric a product manager would select.
Pain Point: A pain point is a problem that prospective customers or users are experiencing. Pain point identification is helpful to generate targeted solutions.
Product Roadmap: High-level summary of a product’s vision and direction over time.
Refactor: A restructuring of the existing computer code. There are a variety of reasons for a code refactor. Often, refactors are advantageous because they accelerate product development or reduce vulnerabilities.
RICE Framework: The RICE scoring model is a prioritization framework designed to help product managers determine which products, features, and other initiatives to put on their roadmaps by scoring these items according to four factors. These factors, which form the acronym RICE, are reach, impact, confidence, and effort. (Read more at here)
ROI: Stands for return on investment.
UI: User interface. This is the means by which the user and computing system interact. UI most often refers to the design of the application or website.
Use case: A hypothetical scenario for how a user might interact with the product. Each use case generally outlines a particular value proposition to the user.
UX: User experience. This is the overall experience of the user’s use of the product. The user interface (UI) is often a part of the UX, but the user experience could include even more. For example, the user experience of booking a hotel on the phone might involve the pleasantness of the phone call or the reliability of the connection.
Value proposition: Answers the question: How does this product add value to the end-user? What is the value of the product?
