With a knack for etymology, I'm delighted by the fanciful metaphors that product management is rich with - shorthand for complex abstract ideas to align teams. This is an exercise in collecting them as I go, grouped. ### Strategy & Vision - **The North Star:** This is the single, guiding metric or principle that the entire company or product team orients around. It's the "guiding light" (like Polaris for sailors) that keeps everyone moving in the same direction, even when they're working on different things. - **Building a Moat:** A metaphor from medieval castles. A "moat" refers to a sustainable competitive advantage; something that is difficult for competitors to copy. This could be network effects, high switching costs, a strong brand, or unique technology. - **The Pivot:** Borrowed from basketball, this means keeping one foot planted (your core vision or insight) while changing direction with the other (your strategy or product). It's not a full restart, but a significant change in direction based on new learning. - **Hedgehogs vs. Foxes:** From an essay by Isaiah Berlin. Hedgehogs know "one big thing" and apply that single-minded vision to everything (e.g., Google and search). **Foxes** know "many little things" and are more agile, tactical, and adaptive. PMs often debate which approach is better for their situation. ### Product & Development - **Skateboard to Car (or Cupcake to Wedding Cake):** This is a metaphor for building a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). The wrong way is to build a wheel, then an axle, then a chassis (delivering no value until the end). The right way is to deliver something small but functional (a **skateboard**), then iterate on it (scooter, bike, motorcycle) until you finally have the full-featured **car**. - **Shipping:** A very common (and literal) metaphor from the days of physical software disks. It simply means releasing the product or feature to customers. You'll hear "When does it ship?" or "We shipped it last night." - **Dogfooding:** Short for "eating your own dog food." This means using your own product internally. The idea is that if you're not willing to use your own product to run your business, you can't expect customers to. - **Planting Seeds:** Investing in small, experimental features or products that may not have a huge immediate payoff but have the potential to grow into something significant in the future. ### Challenges & Prioritization - **Technical Debt (or "Tech Debt"):** This is a financial metaphor. When you take a shortcut in development (like using messy code) to ship faster, you are "taking on debt." You get a short-term benefit (speed), but you will have to "pay it back" later with interest (spending time refactoring the code, which slows down future development). - **Boiling the Ocean:** A colorful way of saying the scope of a project is way too large. It describes an attempt to solve every problem at once, which is impossible and will likely result in failure (just as you can't literally boil the entire ocean). - **Yak Shaving:** This is a metaphor for a cascade of prerequisite tasks. You start trying to solve one problem ("I need to ship this feature"), which requires you to do another thing ("I need to update this API"), which requires another... until you find yourself doing something seemingly unrelated, like "shaving a yak." - **Herding Cats:** This refers to the challenge of trying to align stakeholders (designers, engineers, sales, marketing) who all have different opinions, priorities, and personalities. It's the human-alignment part of the job. ### Users & Value - **Painkillers vs. Vitamins:** This is a framework for prioritization. - **Painkillers** solve an immediate, acute, and obvious problem for a user (e.g., "I can't send this invoice"). Users will actively seek these out and often pay for them. - **Vitamins** are "nice-to-have" features. They are good for the user, but the user may not realize they "need" them and the problem isn't as urgent (e.g., "a dashboard that shows my monthly trends"). - **The Funnel:** A marketing and sales metaphor for the user's journey. You start with many users at the "top of the funnel" (Awareness), but fewer and fewer make it to the next stages (Interest, Consideration, Conversion, Retention). - **The Flywheel:** A physics metaphor popularized by Amazon. Instead of a linear "funnel," a flywheel is a system where each part reinforces the others, creating a self-perpetuating cycle of growth. For example, more customers lead to more product reviews, which leads to a better product, which attracts more customers.