Product Glossary

A metric is a tool to measure something. 

You can define metrics to measure product success, for example:

• Monthly Active Users
• Retention Rate
• Signup conversion

Or similarly for financial success, for example:

• EBITDA
• Burn rate
• Revenue

A metric should have a clear definition in what they mean and how they are calculated. 

For example:

Monthly Active Users: Number of users who have opened the app at least once the last 28 days.

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Conversion is a term often used in the context of funnels. 

Each funnel has a goal, and objective we want the customer to complete. 

We talk about a conversion whenever a customer completes the desired goal.

Example:

In a newsletter funnel the desired goal is to collect an e-mail address. So we talk about conversion whenever a customer enters their e-mail address in a form. 

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Retention refers to the ability to keep customers using a product or service over a specified period of time. 

Engagement measures how users interact with your product or service. We talk about highly engaged users when they interact frequently with a product or service. 

Engagement indicates how much value users find in your product. Highly engaged users often lead to better retention and are generally more profitable. 

Your product and business model determine which interactions are important and what frequency to expect.  For a social networking app we would expect daily view, likes and follow. For a travel app monthly usage might be equally valuable. 

We talk about activation, or an activated user, whenever a user has completed a major activity within the product or service. 

Some examples are:

• Follow 10 or more users
• Added a first product to the shopping cart

Activation indicates a user understands your product or service and finds its value tangible. 

Activation is strongly linked with engagement. Similarly the definition of an activated user is determined by the type of product or service. 

We talk about user acquisition when attracting new users to our product or service. An acquisition strategy is a combination of marketing (growth marketing) and the ability to convert leads into downloads, installs and signups. 

A funnel is a way of breaking down the customer journey into smaller stages. There are many forms and applications of funnels. In terms of product development we typically talk about the Acquisition, Activation, Retention and Revenue funnels. In this AARR-funnel we describe the stages in which we acquire a users and convert them into paying customers. 

Growth loops describe the drivers for acquisition and engagement in your product. Growth loops help you connect inputs to outputs. They show you how to reinvest the result of a loop back into the loop (or a new one). This compounding effect of growth loops is a massive win compared to linear funnels. We can identify two types of loops, acquisitions loops and engagement loops.

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Growth marketing is a data-driven approach that test the performance of marketing effort across different channels and messages. 

Firestore is a scalable database part of Firebase. It is created to support mobile apps and web apps. Firestore can provide realtime data to apps and is able to scale quickly from 100 to 1.000.000 users.

More info on firebase.com

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A product strategy defines the who, why, how and what of the product you are building.

• Target Audience - Who needs our help?
• Problem - Why do they need our help?
• Solution - How are we going to help?
• Product - What do we build to provide this solution?

This can be translated in a product roadmap to determine how the strategy will be executed.

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A design process to help designers and non-designers to explore problems and find solutions.

More info on Design Council

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A step in the Double Diamond design process. In the define step, the findings of Discovery are used to define the challenge in a way it opens up the solution space.

More info on Design Council

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A step in the Double Diamond design process. It helps people understand, rather than simply assume, what the problem is. Using several methods and tools it involves speaking, researching and empathizing with people to discover their problems.

More info on Design Council

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‘Jobs to be Done’ is a concept created by Clayton M. Christensen. It provides a mental model to help you guide towards innovative solutions and understand the higher purpose of why customers buy products or services.

More info on jtbd.info

A tool used to store all source code for a product. Using a code repository helps developers collaborate more easily and keeps a record of all changes made to the codebase.

The process of designing products that provide a meaningful and relevant experience to users. A UX designer thinks about a product on a more strategic level. What does a user want to accomplish, learn, find, … when using the product. How should the product be structured, flow and how should the information be presented.

More info can be found here

Flutter is a technology from Google that allows developers to build a mobile app once, and run it on both iOS and Android devices.

Read more about what Flutter is and why we use it on our blog.

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Firebase is a mobile development platform from Google. It provides developers with a database, remote processing, data storage, authentication, notifications, … It supports the so-called backend of a software application.

More info on firebase.com

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A part of a software application invisible to the user. A user cannot directly interact with a backend, only via the applications’ user interface. A backend is typically responsible for data storage, databases, notifications, … In modern software, a backend is built in the cloud.

A process for creative problem solving, providing a set of tools and methods to understand problems, ideate and prototype ideas. At its core, Design Thinking’ is human-centred, triggering a mind-shift to empathise and understand users or customers on a human level.

More info on IDEO U

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According to Lean Startup: “A version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort”

Simply put, what product should we build to provide some value to customers and helps us to learn more about our customers, product and business model.

However by taking the ‘minimal’ too literal one might take shortcuts on design and execution. That’s a trap, and you’ll fail in the long term.
You should at least focus on a Minimal Lovable Product.

A Minimum Viable Product is an MVP, but with sufficient attention on the execution and experience side of the product.

For us this is common sense, so we’ll often use MVP as a term. However, we always make sure the experience side of the product taken care of.

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The capability to develop mobile apps that work on more than one platform(OS). It provides developers to write code once, and run it on several operations systems. In most cases, iOS and Android operating systems are targeted.

The process of defining, designing and building digital products.

Digital product design is about problem-solving to improve the overall product experience. It is about connecting the dots between different domains and skills, user expectations, business needs, brand, technology, UX design, UI design, …

A digital experience is every interaction between a customer and a company or brand made possible by digital technology. It can be online interactions such as websites or mobile apps. It can also be an offline interaction improved by digital capabilities.