Glossary of Project Management Terms

Project management square says that when doing a project, scope, quality, manpower and time are in tension with each other. If you control three, the fourth will become unpredictable.

Lead time: The time a project takes. e.g., the lead time for hiring is 3 quarters, which means you need to start hiring 3 quarters ahead of when you need the results from hiring (such as feature delivery).

Launch and iterate: Whatever you’re building, keep launching as you’re building it, not after. This reduces the risk that you’ll spend a lot of time building a polished implementation of the wrong product.

Waterfall: A style of management that assumes that decisions once made never change.

Agile: A style of management that acknowledges that decisions are subject to change when the inputs to the decision change or we learn more. If we say, “We’re going to pick Firebase”, that doesn’t mean we’re going to use it forever. It means that we’ve researched it, built some a proof of concept, identified risks, and tried to resolve as many as possible. We’ve researched it as well as can be researched before fully committing to it, and we believe that it’s the best option for us right now. So we’re going to use it, and once we learn a lot more about it, if we learn that a different tool would be better, we reserve the right to change our decisions.

Kanban: A style of agile, which I recommend.

Backlog: Tasks, or areas of work, that the team has agreed won’t be worked on now, to make space for others which we do want to work on. If you try to do everything at once, nothing gets done.

Retrospective: When something bad happens, like an outage, the team should get together and have a blameless conversation about the sequence of events that occurred, and what can be done to make things go better next time. Retrospectives should also be done when something went especially well, like a major launch that goes flawlessly, to identify what went the team did right (like saying no to increased scope in the last minute).

If you liked this, you may like Glossary of Product Management Terms and Glossary of Engineering Management Terms.