Wdyt?, IC, OKR — what common acronyms and abbreviations in tech mean. A glossary.
A cheat sheet for surviving on Slack, esp. if you’re working for a fast-paced product company.
We get it.
Things move fast, there are too many meetings and you quickly want to respond to those pings.
Starting at a new company often comes with a whole load of unfamiliar abbreviations and acronyms. Many of them are company-specific and a beast to learn, but some of them are commonly used throughout the industry. Still, it can be difficult to know them all — and remember them.
So here’s a little overview of popular shortenings that might come in handy the next time you scroll Slack or Confluence — from someone who builds glossaries for a living.
The not-even-close-to-covering-it-all-glossary
- Afaic — As far as I’m concerned
- Afaik — As far as I know
- AI — Artificial intelligence (lol, sorry, had to include it)
- Asap — As soon as possible
- Fwiw — For what it’s worth
- Fyi — For your information
- IC — Individual contributor
- Idk — I don’t know
- Iirc — If I recall correctly
- Imo — In my opinion
- Iinm — If I’m not mistaken
- Iow — In other words
- KPI — Key performance indicator
- Kutgw — Keep up the good work
- OKR — Objectives and key results
- OOO — Out of office
- Otoh — On the other hand
- PIP — Performance improvement plan
- Pls — Please (for lazy people)
- PM — Product manager
- Sfsg — So far, so good
- Tbf — To be frank or to be fair
- TC — Total compensation (as in: your salary including stock)
- Thx — Thanks (for lazy people)
- Tl;dr — Too long, didn’t read (often used to preface a shorter summary of something)
- Ttyl — Talk to you later
- Wdyt? — What do you think?
- Wfh — Work from home
- Ymmv — Your mileage may vary
- Yw — You’re welcome
- 4Viz — For visibility
A note on capitalization
As you may have noticed, I capitalized some letters but kept the majority lowercase. You will see a mix of both IRL (in real life) as it’s usually a preference of the individual you’re chatting with. The consensus is that lowercase is faster to type than uppercase so you’ll likely see more of those — with the caveat that they are harder to recognize in a paragraph of text or wdyt?
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Nicole is a Content Design Lead and host of the Content Rookie pod. She lives in Sweden, where she writes poetry and chases her toddler around her clover lawn. Website. Twitter.
