Product Management Dictionary

Project Origin

As part of her independent studying and research efforts, my mentee found a spreadsheet of 'product management' terms.

I love the idea of having a quick resource to check unfamiliar (and esoteric) terminology, and when my mentee showed me the spreadsheet, I was instantly reminded of the "jargon and acronyms" dictionary that we had back in 2016 when I worked for Amazon.

To practice discussing pain-points, my mentee and I reviewed her process of discovering and looking up terms and looked for opportunities for improvement.

Defining the Problem

"Welcome to the world of software (there's a lot to learn)."

To scope the problem we wanted to solve, my mentee and I built a list of pain-points:

• There's a lot to learn and it can be a steep learning curve for new-hires as they learn all of the new jargon and acronyms at once
• Terms don't usually mean the same across industries - that adds a lot of "noise" to be sifted through, and requires that the person looking up a term has a preexisting concept of what answer they're looking for
• Many sources of information are inaccurate, unreliable, or incomplete, and without a clear understanding of the term or concept, it can be difficult to discern which sources are good
• Few comprehensive lists of terms exist, and what lists do exist are seldom organized systematically
• Definitions aren't available without a somewhat-exhaustive search to both source and verify definitions

The pain-points were then distilled down to these simple statements

• There are hundreds of new terms and concepts for new-hires to learn
• Searching the Internet produces mixed or unhelpful results
• The information on the Internet is often inaccurate, conflicting, or out-of-date
• Most software acronyms are too esoteric or 'overloaded' to look up
• It's difficult to find related resources for broad concepts

We also produced a list of pain-points specific to using the spreadsheet:

• The spreadsheet is slow to load (because it's dependent on Google Docs)
• Using the spreadsheet is error-prone (it's too easy to accidentally make changes)
• Accessing the spreadsheet requires an Internet connection
• It's unclear how to request revisions (or whether updates will be made)
• Using the included resource-links is cumbersome (links require many clicks to open)

Problem Statement

"Learning about software and the design-development process generally requires a foundational knowledge of the disciplines to understand the information in context. While information is plentiful on the internet, searching for explanations of unfamiliar terms is time-consuming, unreliable, and often distracting."

Goal

"We intend to address the challenges of prerequisite knowledge and cumbersome, protracted searches for reliable definitions by providing a simple solution to efficiently find the domain-specific definitions of unfamiliar terms explained in plain English."

Research

There are relatively few resources for learning about software that are both free and reliable. The simplest solutions like online-spreadsheets are easy to share, but difficult to use. The alternatives tend to be pay-walled websites that might have more reliable information, but at a cost of money and accessibility.

UI

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(click to expand) collapse

Dictionary entries have no default styling. The goal was to create entries that look good but aren't distracting.

One benefit of cleaning up the typography was that we realized that there was an opportunity to add linked terms to reduce redundancy and improve the "quality of life" for users.

Future Development

We hope to bring the dictionary to more devices -- targeting iOS is our next goal. (Hopefully we'll get an answer soon)

The dictionary will be even more useful if it can download new terms and periodically check for updates like the built-in dictionaries can. We hope to either support retrieving definitions from an online source or build-in automatic update-tracking in a future enhancement.