Originally published on jshmllr.com
Product designers, entrepreneurs, and strategic thinkers can use this language to:
- Articulate complex design challenges more precisely
- Shift perspective from feature-driven to experience-driven design
- Create shared understanding across multidisciplinary teams
- Develop more empathetic, intuitive product experiences
- Go to Market (GTM): The strategy and actions used to launch a product or service into a new market. It encompasses pricing, sales, marketing, and distribution channels.
- Revenue: The total income generated from selling goods or services, calculated before deducting any expenses.
- TAM (Total Addressable Market): The entire market size for a product or service, including all potential customers. It helps measure market potential and estimate achievable sales.
- MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue): The predictable revenue generated each month from subscriptions or recurring services. It provides a stable income stream and is crucial for SaaS businesses.
- OPEX (Operating Expenses): The ongoing costs of running a business, excluding the cost of goods sold (COGS). Examples include rent, salaries, marketing, and administrative costs.
- Profit: The financial gain earned after deducting all expenses from revenue. It reflects the success of a business's operations.
- Top of Market (TOM): The highest-priced segment of a market, targeting customers willing to pay a premium for advanced features or exclusivity.
- Break Even: The point where revenue equals total expenses, resulting in neither profit nor loss. It indicates the minimum sales needed to cover operating costs.
- Roadmap: A high-level plan outlining future goals, milestones, and initiatives for a product, service, or business. It provides direction and clarity for decision-making.
- Intention Architecture: The deliberate structural design of a product that guides users towards desired actions while maintaining a sense of user agency and natural discovery.
- Constraint Canvas: A strategic framework that views product limitations not as obstacles, but as generative opportunities for creative problem-solving.
- Latent Desire Mapping: Identifying unspoken user needs that exist beneath surface-level requirements.
- Temporal Design: Designing products that intentionally evolve and adapt over time, creating dynamic user experiences.
- Emergence Theory in Design: Creating simple rules that allow complex, user-driven behaviors to naturally emerge.
- Desire Path: The informal route people naturally take, often deviating from the intended path. In product design, it represents how users actually interact with a product versus how designers initially imagined they would.
- Friction Ecosystem: The collection of subtle barriers, complications, and points of resistance within a product experience that can frustrate or slow down user engagement.
- Negative Space Value: The strategic importance of what's not explicitly designed – the quiet, unoccupied areas that provide breathing room, clarity, and psychological comfort in a product interface.
- Empathy Multiplier: A design approach that goes beyond understanding user needs to anticipate and solve latent or unexpressed challenges before users articulate them.
- Signal-to-Noise Ratio of Features: An analytical approach measuring the value and clarity of product features against the potential confusion or distraction they might introduce.
- User Sovereignty: A design ethos prioritizing user control, transparency, and the ability to customize or opt out of product experiences.
- Contextual Affordance: Design elements that intuitively suggest their use within a specific user context or environment.
- Edge Case Resilience: The ability of a product to maintain functionality and user experience in unexpected or extreme scenarios.
- Friction Choreography: Intentionally designing moments of controlled friction to create meaningful user interactions.
- Intuition Inheritance: Design that builds upon learned behaviors from other products to create instant familiarity.
- Narrative Scaffolding: Using storytelling principles to guide user understanding and engagement with a product.
- Subtraction Principle: The art of removing features to enhance overall product clarity and user experience.
- Cognitive Load Budget: The predetermined mental effort a product allows users to expend before experiencing decision fatigue or disengagement.
- Experience Entropy: The natural tendency of product experiences to become more complex and less intuitive over time without intentional simplification.
- Emotional Surface Area: The total psychological and emotional touchpoints a product creates, measuring its capacity to generate meaningful connections beyond functional utility.
- Serendipity Quotient: A measure of how well a product creates unexpected, pleasant discoveries or opportunities for users that weren't part of the original design intent.
- Psychological Momentum: The design principle of creating user interfaces and experiences that feel effortless and generate a sense of continuous, smooth progression.
- Cognitive Ergonomics: The study of how product design interacts with human mental processes and decision-making.
- Ambient Engagement: Design strategies that create value and connection without demanding constant user attention.
- Anticipatory Design: Creating interfaces that make decisions on behalf of users before they even realize they need something.
- Emotional Topology: Mapping the emotional journey and touchpoints users experience while interacting with a product.
- Cognitive Camouflage: Design that makes complex functionality feel simple and natural.
- Systemic Empathy: Designing products that understand and respond to broader contextual user needs beyond immediate interactions.
- Silent Telemetry: The passive, unobtrusive data collection that reveals user behaviors and preferences without disruptive tracking or explicit user consent.
- Adaptive Minimalism: A design philosophy that removes complexity not by eliminating features, but by intelligently contextualizing and prioritizing them based on user behavior.
- Peripheral Awareness Interface: Design that provides important information without interrupting the primary user experience.
- Potential Energy Design: Creating product interfaces that have inherent potential for user-driven exploration and customization.
- Liminal Experience Design: Crafting transitions and in-between states that are as meaningful as the primary interaction points.
- Quantum Feature Set: The ability of a product to simultaneously exist in multiple feature states until observed by the user.