Business Lingo Guide is a glossary guide ebook that describes one topic per page. The guide is intended for quick easy learning about business idioms, phrases, and buzzwords.
All the topics here are chosen because they have come up in real-world projects, with real-world stakeholders who want to learn about the topic.
If you have suggestions for more topics, then please let me know.
You can read any topic page, in any order, at any time. Each topic page is intended be clear on its own, without needing cross-references or links.
People should read this guide if they want to learn quickly about business lingo, and how its practiced in companies today. Some of the lingo may be obvious, especially to United States English speakers.
For project managers, this guide is intending to summarize and distill many of your daily concepts and terminology. For you, the value of the guide is in being able to quickly and easily teach stakeholders about your project management concepts. For example, if you want to use a particular technique such as PDCA or OODA or DMAIC with your project stakeholders, then you can quickly and easily direct the stakeholders to this guide and its relevant topic pages, as one aspect of your communications. You can freely excerpt, remix, and share these pages with your coworkers.
For people who know English as a secondary language, or who are English language learners, this guide is intending to bring you up to speed quickly and easily on business lingo, so you can work better with teams and stakeholders that use the lingo. When you know the right terminology, then you're better-able to share information, collaborate, and create the working relationships that you value.
For students and educators, this guide is a snapshot of industry lingo that can help bridge the gap between academic studies, such as computer science studies, and industry jobs, such as computer programming jobs. If students are able to skim what's in this book, they will have an advantage when they go for job interviews and encounter this lingo.
I am creating this ebook because of years of experience in consulting work, with a wide range of clients, from small startups to enormous enterprises. This kind of business lingo is present in many of the projects and at many of the clients.
When I work with companies and teams, then I'm able to use glossaries like this one to help create shared context and clearer communication. This can accelerate working together, and can help teams forge better project plans, in my direct experience.
For example, one of my enterprise clients describes this kind of shared context and clear communication in a positive sense as "singing from the same songbook". When a team understands project management terminology, and has a quick easy glossary for definitions and explanations, then it's akin to teammates with the same songbook.
What I discovered is that these kinds of glossaries can be especially helpful for teams with members coming from various cultures, such as from different countries, or different industries, or different ways of working. The topic pages help provide a baseline for better collaboration.
What I discovered with teammates from non-Western or non-English backgrounds is that business has many social quotations, aphorisms, and idioms that come up frequently and that that teammates are expected to know.
For example, my peers in San Francisco Bay Area startups will likely know the lingo "Get on the front foot". But it turns out this idiom isn't immediately familiar to many people from many other places. The topic pages cover idioms, to improve shared understanding.
Yes there are three more guides that may be of interest to you.
Startup Business Guide:
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Learn about startup concepts that help with entrepreneurship. Some examples are pitch decks, market/customer/product discovery, product-market fit (PMF), minimum viable product (MVP), technology industries and sectors, company roles and responsibilities, sales and marketing, venture capital (VC) and investors, legal entities and useful contracts.
Project Management Guide:
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Learn about concepts that help with leading projects, programs, and portfolios. Some examples are the project management life cycle (PMLC), outputs versus outcomes (OVO), Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), SMART criteria, Work Breakdown Structure (WBS), change management, digital transformation, and project management practices including agile, lean, kanban, and kaizen.
UI/UX Design Guide:
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Learn about user interface (UI) design and user experience (UX) development. Some examples are User-Centered Design (UCD), Information Architecture (IA), design management, task analysis, ideation, mockups, use cases, user stories, modeling diagrams, affordances, accessibility, internationalization and localization, UI/UX testing, and AI for UI/UX.