Tech glossary

Tech terms explained in plain English

87+ terms you will encounter in your first tech job — explained for career changers.

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A

A/B Testing: A way of comparing two versions of something — a webpage, an email subject line, a button colour — to see which one performs better. Half the users see version A, half see version B, and the data decides the winner.
Accessibility: The practice of designing products so that people with disabilities — visual, motor, hearing, cognitive — can use them fully. In practice this means things like screen-reader support, sufficient colour contrast, and keyboard navigation.
Agile: A way of working in short cycles (usually two-week 'sprints') so teams can adapt quickly instead of locking in a plan for months. The opposite of Waterfall. Most tech companies run some version of Agile.
Analytics: The collection and analysis of data about how people use a product. Analytics tell you things like how many people visited a page, where they dropped off, and which features are most popular.
API: Short for Application Programming Interface. An API is a set of rules that lets two software systems talk to each other. When you log into an app with Google, an API is doing that behind the scenes.
ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue): The total amount of money a subscription business expects to receive in a year from its current customers. A key health metric for SaaS companies — if ARR is growing, the business is growing.

B

B2B: Business-to-business. A company that sells its product or service to other companies rather than to individual consumers. Salesforce selling CRM software to corporations is B2B.
B2C: Business-to-consumer. A company that sells directly to individual people. Netflix, Spotify, and Amazon are classic B2C examples.
Backlog: A prioritised list of all the features, fixes, and tasks a team wants to work on eventually. Items at the top are most important; items at the bottom may never get built. The product manager owns the backlog.
Beta: An early version of a product released to a limited audience before the public launch. Beta users test real features and report bugs so the team can fix problems before everyone gets access.
Bounce Rate: The percentage of visitors who land on a page and leave without doing anything else — no clicks, no scroll, no other pages. A high bounce rate often signals a mismatch between what the user expected and what they found.
Bug: An error or flaw in software that causes it to behave in an unintended way. Bugs range from minor visual glitches to critical crashes. Finding and fixing bugs is called debugging.
Business Model Canvas: A one-page visual framework that maps out how a business creates, delivers, and captures value. It covers nine building blocks including customer segments, revenue streams, key partners, and cost structure.

C

Churn Rate: The percentage of customers who cancel or stop using a product within a given period. High churn is a red flag — it means the product is not retaining the people it acquired.
Conversion Rate: The percentage of users who complete a desired action — signing up, purchasing, upgrading. If 100 people visit a pricing page and 5 buy, the conversion rate is 5%.
CRM: Customer Relationship Management. Software (like Salesforce or HubSpot) that helps teams track interactions with customers and prospects, manage pipelines, and follow up at the right time.
CSS: Cascading Style Sheets. The code that controls how a webpage looks — colours, fonts, spacing, layout. HTML defines the structure; CSS makes it visually polished.
Customer Journey: The full sequence of steps a customer takes from first hearing about a product to becoming a loyal user. Mapping the customer journey helps teams find friction points and improvement opportunities.
Customer Success: The team responsible for ensuring customers get real value from the product after they buy. Customer Success proactively monitors usage, runs check-ins, and prevents churn — it is different from support, which reacts to problems.

D

Dashboard: A visual display of key metrics and data, usually in a single screen. Dashboards let managers and teams track performance at a glance without digging through raw data.
Data Pipeline: An automated system that moves data from one place to another, often transforming it along the way. For example, collecting raw user events from an app, cleaning them, and loading them into a data warehouse for analysis.
DAU / MAU (Daily / Monthly Active Users): These metrics count how many unique people use a product in a given day or month. The DAU/MAU ratio — sometimes called 'stickiness' — shows how often monthly users actually return each day.
DevOps: A set of practices and culture that brings development (writing code) and operations (running servers) teams together. The goal is to release software faster and more reliably by automating testing and deployment.
Discovery: The research phase in product development where teams investigate a problem before building a solution. Discovery includes user interviews, competitor analysis, and data review to make sure the team is solving the right problem.

E

Empathy Map: A collaborative tool that helps teams understand what a user thinks, feels, says, and does in a given context. It forces the team to step outside their assumptions and see the world from the user's perspective.
EPICS: Large bodies of work that can be broken down into smaller tasks or user stories. An epic might be 'User authentication' — a big theme that contains many individual tasks like 'sign up', 'log in', and 'reset password'.
Error Rate: The percentage of actions or requests that fail due to an error. A high error rate on checkout, for example, means customers are hitting bugs when trying to pay — a critical problem to fix immediately.
Ethnographic Research: A qualitative research method where a researcher observes users in their natural environment rather than a lab setting. It reveals how people actually behave — not just what they say they do.

F

Feature Flag: A toggle in software that turns a feature on or off without deploying new code. Teams use feature flags to release new features to a small group of users first, then gradually roll out to everyone.
Figma: The industry-standard design tool for creating wireframes, mockups, and interactive prototypes. Product designers and UX researchers use Figma to collaborate with product managers and engineers before any code is written.
Friction (UX): Anything that makes it harder for a user to complete a task. Extra steps, confusing labels, slow load times, and unclear error messages are all forms of friction. Reducing friction is central to good UX design.
Funnel: A series of steps a user takes toward a goal, like signing up or purchasing. Called a funnel because fewer people complete each step — many enter the top, fewer reach the bottom. Identifying where users drop off is key to improving conversion.

G

Go-to-Market (GTM): The plan for launching a product to market — who you are targeting, how you will reach them, what message you will use, and through which channels. A strong GTM strategy can make the difference between a launch that lands and one that flops.
Growth Hacking: A set of creative, low-cost tactics focused on rapidly growing a user base. Growth hacking blends marketing, product, and data — classic examples include Dropbox's referral programme and Airbnb's Craigslist integration.

H

Happy Path: The ideal sequence of steps a user takes when everything goes right — no errors, no confusion, no edge cases. Designers define the happy path first, then plan for everything that can go wrong around it.
Heatmap: A visual overlay on a webpage that shows where users click, scroll, and hover most. Hot colours (red, orange) mean lots of activity; cool colours (blue) mean little. Heatmaps reveal what users actually pay attention to.
Hypothesis: A testable prediction about what will happen if you make a change. In product development: 'We believe that if we simplify the sign-up form, more users will complete it.' A good hypothesis states what you will do, what you expect, and how you will measure it.

I

Ideation: The structured process of generating a large number of ideas before narrowing down to the best one. Ideation workshops use techniques like brainstorming, mind-mapping, and 'How Might We' questions to open up creative possibilities.
Information Architecture: The way content and features are organised and labelled within a product. Good information architecture makes it easy for users to find what they are looking for. Bad IA leaves them lost and frustrated.
Iteration: One cycle of building, testing, and improving. Instead of trying to get everything perfect in one go, teams iterate — ship a version, learn from real users, then make it better. This is the core rhythm of Agile development.

J

JIRA: A widely used project-management tool where teams track tasks, bugs, and sprints. If you work in tech, you will almost certainly encounter JIRA — or a similar tool like Linear or Asana.
Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD): A framework for understanding why people buy or use products. Instead of focusing on features, JTBD asks: what 'job' is the customer trying to get done? People do not buy a drill — they buy a hole in the wall.
Journey Map: A visual diagram that illustrates the steps a user goes through when interacting with a product over time, including their thoughts, feelings, and pain points at each stage. Journey maps reveal opportunities to improve the experience.

K

Kanban: A visual workflow system where tasks are represented as cards moving across columns (typically 'To Do', 'In Progress', 'Done'). Kanban limits work in progress to help teams stay focused and spot bottlenecks quickly.
KPI (Key Performance Indicator): A measurable value that shows how well a team or product is performing against its goals. Examples: monthly active users, customer satisfaction score, revenue growth. A good KPI is specific, measurable, and directly tied to a goal.

L

Landing Page: A standalone webpage designed to convert visitors into leads or customers. A landing page has one job — get the user to take a specific action like signing up, downloading something, or buying — and eliminates distractions that might prevent that.
Lean Startup: A methodology popularised by Eric Ries that emphasises building products in short cycles, measuring real customer feedback, and learning quickly. The core loop is Build, Measure, Learn — repeated as many times as needed.
LTV (Lifetime Value): The total amount of revenue a business expects to earn from a single customer over the entire relationship. Comparing LTV to the cost of acquiring that customer (CAC) tells you whether your business model is sustainable.

M

Mockup: A high-fidelity, static visual representation of a product's design — showing real colours, typography, and layout — but without interactive functionality. Mockups come after wireframes and before a working prototype.
MoSCoW Method: A prioritisation framework that sorts features into four buckets: Must have (critical), Should have (important), Could have (nice to have), and Won't have (out of scope). It forces teams to be explicit about what is truly essential.
MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue): The predictable revenue a subscription business earns every month from its current customers. MRR is a pulse-check on a SaaS company's health — steady MRR growth means the business is scaling reliably.
MVP (Minimum Viable Product): The simplest version of a product that still delivers enough value to attract early users and generate real learning. An MVP is not a half-baked product — it is a deliberately scoped one that tests the core hypothesis with the least amount of effort.

N

North Star Metric: The single metric that best captures the core value a product delivers to customers. A team's North Star aligns everyone — marketing, engineering, design, support — around the same goal. Spotify's North Star is time spent listening.
NPS (Net Promoter Score): A customer loyalty metric measured by asking: 'How likely are you to recommend us to a friend, on a scale of 0 to 10?' Promoters (9–10) minus Detractors (0–6) gives you your NPS. It is a quick proxy for overall customer happiness.

O

OKR (Objectives and Key Results): A goal-setting framework where teams define an ambitious Objective (qualitative direction) and measurable Key Results that confirm progress. OKRs are usually set quarterly and kept public so everyone can see what each team is working toward.
Onboarding: The experience a new user has when they first start using a product — account setup, tutorial flows, first-use guidance. Great onboarding gets users to their 'aha moment' (when they first see the product's value) as fast as possible.

P

Persona: A fictional but research-backed profile of a typical user. A persona captures demographics, goals, frustrations, and behaviours — giving the team a concrete human to design for rather than an abstract 'user'.
Pivot: A significant change in product strategy based on what the team learned from real users. A pivot is not giving up — it is using evidence to course-correct toward a better opportunity. Slack, for example, pivoted from a failed gaming company.
PRD (Product Requirements Document): A document that describes what a feature or product needs to do — the problem it solves, who it is for, and what success looks like. Engineers and designers use the PRD to understand what they are building and why.
Product Roadmap: A high-level visual plan that shows what the team will build, when, and why. A roadmap communicates priorities to stakeholders and aligns the whole organisation around the product direction — it is a strategic document, not a fixed schedule.
Prototype: An early, often interactive model of a design used to test ideas with real users before writing production code. Prototypes range from paper sketches to pixel-perfect Figma flows. The point is to learn fast and cheaply.

Q

QA (Quality Assurance): The process of testing software to find bugs and ensure it meets requirements before it reaches users. QA engineers write test cases, run them manually or automatically, and report issues back to developers.
Query (SQL): A question or instruction written in SQL to retrieve or manipulate data stored in a database. In a tech job, you may write queries to answer questions like 'How many users signed up last week?' without needing a data analyst.

R

RCA (Root Cause Analysis): A structured method for investigating why a problem occurred — not just fixing the surface symptom, but tracing back to the underlying cause. A common tool is 'Five Whys': keep asking 'why?' until you hit the real issue.
Regression Testing: Testing that checks whether a new change has accidentally broken something that was already working. After every release, teams run regression tests to ensure old features still behave correctly.
Retention: How well a product keeps users coming back over time. Retention is often measured as the percentage of users still active after 7, 30, or 90 days. It is the single most important signal of whether a product is delivering lasting value.
Roadmap: See 'Product Roadmap'. In everyday usage, teams also reference roadmaps for engineering, design, and marketing — any discipline can have a roadmap that communicates its priorities over time.

S

SaaS: Software as a Service. A software delivery model where the product is hosted in the cloud and users access it via a subscription, usually through a web browser. Most modern business software — Slack, Notion, Salesforce — is SaaS.
Scrum: A specific Agile framework with defined roles (Product Owner, Scrum Master, Development Team), ceremonies (sprint planning, daily standups, retrospectives), and artifacts (backlog, sprint board). One of the most common ways to organise a tech team.
SLA (Service Level Agreement): A formal commitment between a service provider and a customer about the expected level of service — often covering uptime, response times, and support availability. If the provider misses the SLA, there are usually financial penalties.
Sprint: A fixed-length work cycle in Agile, typically one or two weeks, during which the team commits to completing a set of tasks. At the end of each sprint, the team reviews what was built and plans the next one.
SQL: Structured Query Language. The standard language for talking to relational databases. SQL lets you retrieve, insert, update, and delete data. It is one of the most valuable skills a non-technical person in tech can learn.
Stakeholder: Anyone with an interest in the outcome of a project — executives, customers, partner teams, investors. Managing stakeholder expectations (keeping them informed, aligned, and not surprised) is a core skill for product managers and project managers.

T

Tech Stack: The combination of technologies, programming languages, frameworks, and tools a team uses to build a product. For example: 'We use React on the front end, Node.js on the back end, and PostgreSQL for the database' describes a tech stack.
Technical Debt: The accumulated cost of shortcuts and quick fixes that made sense in the short term but now slow the team down. Like financial debt, technical debt accrues interest — the longer it is left, the more expensive it becomes to fix.
Test Case: A documented scenario that describes what to test, how to test it, and what the expected result should be. Test cases ensure that QA checks are consistent and repeatable — anyone on the team can run the same test and know what 'passing' looks like.
Touchpoint: Any moment of contact between a user and a product or brand — an email, an in-app notification, a support call, an onboarding screen. Mapping touchpoints helps teams understand and improve the full customer experience.

U

UI (User Interface): The visual layer of a product — everything a user sees and interacts with on screen. Buttons, menus, forms, icons, and layouts are all UI. A good UI is intuitive, visually clear, and consistent throughout the product.
Usability Testing: Watching real users try to complete tasks with your product while you observe and take notes. Usability testing reveals usability problems that the team — too close to their own work — can no longer see.
User Story: A short, plain-English description of a feature from the user's point of view, written as: 'As a [type of user], I want to [action], so that [benefit].' User stories keep the team focused on outcomes for real people rather than technical tasks.
UX (User Experience): The overall experience a person has when using a product — not just how it looks (UI), but how it feels, how easy it is to navigate, and whether it actually solves their problem. UX encompasses everything from research to interaction design.

V

Validation: The process of testing an assumption or idea with real users before committing significant resources to building it. Validation confirms you are solving a real problem for real people — not just building what you assumed they needed.
Value Proposition: A clear statement of the specific benefit a product delivers, to whom, and why it is better than the alternatives. A strong value proposition answers the question: 'Why should I choose this over everything else?'
Velocity: A measure of how much work a development team completes in a sprint, often expressed in 'story points'. Teams track velocity over time to forecast how long future work will take and to spot when something is slowing them down.

W

Waterfall: A traditional, linear project management approach where each phase (requirements, design, development, testing, launch) must be fully complete before the next begins. Contrast with Agile, which runs these phases in short overlapping cycles.
WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines): The international standard for web accessibility, published by the W3C. WCAG defines levels (A, AA, AAA) of accessibility compliance. Most companies target WCAG 2.1 AA as a minimum — it covers colour contrast, keyboard access, and screen reader compatibility.
Wireframe: A low-fidelity sketch of a screen's layout — showing structure and hierarchy without colours, branding, or final content. Wireframes are fast to produce and easy to change, making them the ideal tool for exploring ideas early in the design process.

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