Rands Management Glossary – Rands in Repose Skip to content<br>Traditionally, a glossary lives in the back of a book, clarifying terms. This one lives here. The fact is I haven’t used many of the following terms myself, but you still need to know them.<br>Whether you’re a manager or working for a manager, there are those out there who will use these words to confuse you. They’ll throw them out in the middle of the room sans definition as a power play—as an indication that they control the conversation. There are versions of these people who throw these words out and act like they know what they mean to achieve the same effect.<br>The only defense against these words is knowledge. Where a word earned a whole essay, it’s linked.<br>1.0 — The hardest product that you’ll ever develop.<br>360 Review — Process whereby feedback is gathered from your leadership, your peers, and your direct reports on their perceptions of your performance at work. This feedback is usually anonymized but is always illuminating.<br>AA (Administrative Assistant) — Your best friend as a manager. Admins are heavily tapped into corporate machinations and are often able to work miracles when it comes to getting stuff done because they understand how to penetrate bureaucracy. They’re also usually tapped into the Grapevine. There are executive versions of these folks who are even more powerful.<br>Action Items — Things you should write down and do something about. Failure to follow up and/or deliver on action items results in a gentle erosion of your credibility.<br>Advertising — How Google and Facebook make money.<br>Agenda — The things that must occur for any given meeting to be completed. If all participants in said meeting are not aware of the agenda prior to the meeting’s start, time will be wasted.<br>Agent — A robot automatically doing something usually without your permission.<br>AI (Artificial Intelligence) — Intelligence demonstrated by machines. If you aren’t freaked out a little by this, then you might be a machine.<br>AI Slop — Inadequate work shared by a human that was built by a robot.<br>All Hands — A company-wide meeting, usually run by senior leadership. If you’re a manager and there are lots of surprises at these meetings, you might be out of touch. Humans often posture during these events by supplying inane questions and status updates along with really dumb questions. An unexpected All Hands meeting being called usually means trouble.<br>Android — Google’s mobile operating system that used to use desserts as version names. They just use boring numbers now.<br>Anti-Flow — The time you give yourself to stop thinking about your hardest problem so that you magically discover solutions to your hardest problem. See Flow.<br>Apple — The house that Steve Jobs built. Based on market cap, one of the most valuable companies on Earth, but they’d prefer it if you thought of them not as huge, but scrappy.<br>Architect — An engineer who knows what he/she is doing. If an architect says something that appears insane, it’s worth firing off a couple of follow-up questions, as they are often smarter than you.<br>At-Will Employment — Legal definition that states that both employer and employee are employed “at will,” which means they can fire/quit whenever they please. They don’t even have to give a reason.<br>Augmented Reality — Regular reality with helpful overlays.<br>Automation — Testing that can be done by a machine instead of a human. Automation is always pitched as a time saver… but it’s usually a time sink because of unaccounted-for significant maintenance costs.<br>Background Check — A pre-hire check employers use to determine whether or not you are or have ever been a serial murderer.<br>Beta — A milestone in the development process that traditionally follows alpha. This used to mean that a product was generally usable by customers—a select group of customers who were willing to put up with things not working quite right. No one is sure what beta means anymore.<br>Big Data — A term used to describe amounts of data so large that we need teams of humans to sort through it and remind us that we’re really bad at throwing anything away.<br>Board of Directors — The CEO’s boss. They can fire the CEO. They tend to set broad corporate policy and have amazing powers of invisibility.<br>Bonus — Unexpected non-recurring cash. Keyword: non-recurring.<br>Brand — A fuzzy marketing term used to describe you want your customers to feel about your company. Hard to measure, but incredibly valuable.<br>Bugs — Coding errors by engineers often found by QA. Bugs are a source of significant tension late in a product cycle.<br>Build — An internal version of a product that is used for testing. The final version of the product is the last build.<br>Burnout — A sign you might be in the wrong job and/or have a bad manager.<br>Candidate — A job applicant who has made it into the building.<br>Cave, The — The place a nerd goes to get in the zone.<br>CEO (Chief Executive Officer) — The guy/gal in the big office. This is a tough gig. CEOs are busier than you...