Demystifying Tech Jargon to Help You Transition Into Tech

Making the leap into the tech industry comes with a number of unique challenges — not least the mystifying and sometimes mind-boggling amount of acronyms, terminology and tech-speak that abounds in job descriptions or during interviews. This is an industry that has experienced hypergrowth in the last twenty years, and with it has come a vernacular all of its own — familiar to insiders, but often requiring translation for those new to the field.

One heartening thing to consider is that these terms are — believe it or not — intended to simplify things — meaning that once you master them, your life in tech may feel easier (plus you can show off your tech bona fides to interviewers and new colleagues!). So without further ado, let’s dive into some commonly used technical terms, with the understanding that, in this world, acronyms truly rule the roost.

Please consider these descriptions a brief introduction or starting point and feel free to add any additions to the comments below.

Job Descriptions

A good place to start with demystifying tech-speak is with job descriptions. A quick search of digital mental health positions on LinkedIn brings up a range of position descriptions — from Clinical Director, to Research Associate, to Chief Operating Officer. Here are some common phrases that tend to crop up in such job descriptions:

This is a highly visible, creative, and agile* role within a rapidly growing pre-IPO* company in a nascent and fast-growing space.

*Agile: Likely referring to Agile methodology, a practice used in software development that focuses on continual improvement and flexible response to change. SCRUM is a specific type of Agile methodology that is widely used in the tech industry which helps teams to work together and self-organize when working on a problem, reflect on their wins and losses, continually improve.

*Pre-IPO: Refers to the late-stage for a private company to raise funds in advance of its listing on a public exchange.

Some related and useful terms are:

Initial Public Offering (IPO): IPO is the process by which a private company can go public by sale of its stocks to the general public. This can result in major financial gains for owners and employees of the company who may hold equity in the business.

Vesting Equity: This is when you claim or assign future earnings, assets, or payments. It is often used by employees in lieu of stocks or options from their employers — for example, an individual may be partly paid in equity in an early-stage startup, which vests over three years — meaning they will not own the full amount until they have worked for the organisation for three years. Some people are paid fully in equity in a company, meaning they are taking a major chance on that company eventually becoming successful (and are foregoing cash in the meantime!).

Venture Capital (VCs): Venture capital (VC) is a type of financing that investors provide to startup companies and small businesses that are believed to have long-term growth potential.

Phew! Ready for more? You’re likely to see a lot of product-speak in job descriptions as well — with ‘product’ being a catch-all term for the technology team, made up of developers, engineers, product owners, and UX designers.

Product development*, research, user acquisition*, user retention, and user experience*.

*Product development: This typically refers to all of the stages involved in bringing a product (e.g. an app or piece of technology) from concept or idea through market release and beyond — so in the tech space, that would be anything from user interviews to prototyping and evaluating outcomes.

*User acquisition (UA): UA is the process through which new users or customers are won for a mobile app business through marketing-driven activity — whether this is social media, doctor referrals or advertising.

*User Retention: This is the continued use of a product or feature by customers — which is a major challenge in the digital mental health space when products are competing against other attention-grabbing apps.

*User experience (UX): This refers to the overall experience of a person using a product such as a website or computer application, especially in terms of how easy or pleasing it is to use. It is also a large field which contains UX designers and UX researchers, who are highly trained in understanding and designing technology.

User Interface (UI): The (UI) is the point at which human users interact with a computer, website or application, with the goal of effective UI being to make the user’s experience easy and intuitive, requiring minimum effort on the user’s part to receive maximum desired outcome.

Once you’ve made it beyond the job description stage and may have even secured a job in the industry -here are some of the most commonly used terms that you may encounter when working at a tech company.

Common Terminology

Stand-Up — Common meeting format for companies using Agile methodology — a quick meeting (normally under 15 minutes or ‘time boxed’) where a team outlines key tasks for the day and current state of a project.

WIP — Work-In Progress meeting, a regularly scheduled gathering that establishes accountability and deadlines (it may also refer to a document that is a “work in progress” and not yet finalized).

Artificial Intelligence (AI) — Software technology that mimics human intelligence — ideally able to learn, solve problems and self correct.

Natural language processing (NLP) — A subset of AI that allows machines to understand human language (e.g. Siri or Alexa).

Machine learning (ML) — Another subset of AI, the use of algorithms to help machines to learn new information — for example, movie recommendations based on your past Netflix viewing habits.

A/B Testing: This is shorthand for a simple controlled experiment, where two versions of the one item are pitted against each other in user tests, and the best performing item chosen. For example, half of the users of a website are shown one design of a page, and half are shown the other — the page that performs best (in terms of number of users who kept reading, or length of time spent reading that page) is the winner of the test.

Sprint: A sprint is a term used in agile/scrum product development, to describe a period of time during which specific work has to be completed. Sprints traditionally last for 30 days but can be longer or shorter depending on the team’s decision. Each sprint begins with a planning meeting where the product owner and development team agree on what needs to be accomplished during the time period.

Retro: A retro (aka Retrospective) is a meeting that is held at the end of a Scrum sprint cycle where team members reflect on work that was done during the last sprint, and discuss ways of improving both their performance and their output; it is a great opportunity to debrief on what went well and what could be improved, with the focus on how to do things differently next time.

V&V: This stands for Verification and Validation, which are independent procedures that check that a product or service meets its requirements and does what it needs to do. Independent V&V refers to V&V that is performed by a third party, to allow for an examination of the system or product to ensure it fulfills its intended purpose.

Waterfall: The waterfall model is an alternative to agile development, where project activities are broken down into sequential phrases, and each phrase depends on completion of a previous phrase. This model is less iterative and flexible than agile approaches, as progress flows in one direction (‘downstream’ like a waterfall). A major difference between agile and waterfall structure is that once the project development begins in waterfall, there is no way to change the specifications.

T-Shirt sizes: Despite its name, T-Shirt sizes does not refer to what we wear to work — rather, it is a project estimation and capacity planning tool that helps to track the amount of time or effort a project may take. Projects or tasks are assigned a t-shirt size — from XS to XXL — to represent the relative effort of each task. This is useful for leads to understand team capacity, as well as for development team members to communicate their current bandwidth.

Technical Debt: Tech debt, or code debt, describes the consequences of development teams expediting delivery of a piece of work which later needs to be fixed or factored; happening when speed is prioritized over quality. This is common in the tech world and is also called design debt, and can cover anything from bugs to missing documentation.

Use case: A specific situation in which a product or service could potentially be used.

MVP: A minimum viable product (MVP) is a version of a product with just enough features to be usable by early customers/users/members who can then provide feedback for future product development. Many successful products that we use each day started as MVPs — very bare bones products that could then be tested and built on (think the foundation of a structure).

Tear-Down: A product teardown, or simply teardown, is the act of disassembling a product, such that it helps to identify its component parts. For example, I might look at a competitor to my app, and systematically go through their onboarding process and features, and spend time understanding what makes their product so successful.

Open Source — Software whose code is open to the public, and is typically free.

Software as a Service (SaaS) — A software licensing and delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted; known as ‘on demand’ software. SaaS apps are typically accessed by users using a web browser and are common for many business applications, including messaging and office software.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) — A marketing process that attempts to get a website to appear at the top of a results list when people search for the topic, for example in Google. If you work for a tech company, they may have an SEO specialist who has a number of sophisticated methods for promoting your service to come out on top in search results!

SEV: In marketing, SEV stands for Search Engine Visibility; this is about the visibility of a brand’s website in search engine results — the percentage of clicks a company may receive based on where they are ranked in a search results. This is important for companies wanting to be within the top results when a potential customer searches for their service (eg. online counseling service, psychologist near me), and is connected to SEO (search engine optimization).

B2B — Business-to-business is a form of transaction between businesses rather than businesses and an individual customer. This might include manufacturer to wholesaler, or wholesaler to retailer.

CAC — CAC, or Customer Acquisition Cost, is the cost of winning a customer to purchase a product or service (the cost includes things like advertising and promoting the service to acquire the customer). CACs are often related to customer lifetime value, or how much money a company might expect to make from a customer over their lifetime (e.g. does the customer just use the service once or continue to use it?). A high CAC would be worth it if there was an indication that the customer was likely to continue to spend money on a service over time, and so the company will be able to recoup their costs.

ROI: Return on Investment is a term used to measure project returns at any stage, and can be used to evaluate team performance and other factors. One example might be looking at the effectiveness of a marketing campaign in bringing in new customers and revenue, once it is known how much the campaign cost and how much new revenue was brought in. Another example is the mental health space, in which companies look at ROI in terms of savings on healthcare costs or a decrease in lost productivity as a result of spending on mental health.

If the term you’re looking for isn’t here, never fear! We’ve crowdsourced some additional terms we at Therapists in Tech have heard ‘in the wild’ and wondered what they were.

Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) — The practice of bringing your own laptop to work to access company data and platforms — somewhat problematic due to security concerns.

Business Intelligence (BI) — A wide ranging term that covers the analysis of information to help businesses optimize performance.

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) — A set of rules about data and privacy protection for individuals across 31 countries in the European Economic Area. This was brought in in 2018 and had wide ranging implications for data privacy in Europe and across the world.

Runway: Startup runway refers to how many months a business can keep operating before it runs out of money; experts say that most seed-stage startups should plan for a runway of 12–18 months, allowing for some wiggle room for extra funding. Runway includes money for operating costs such as wages and advertising.

Shadow IT — Software and services that are used without approval from internal IT — posing a security risk.

First Principles Thinking: Sometimes called “reasoning from first principles,” the idea is to break down complicated problems into basic elements and then reassemble them from the ground up.

Dog Fooding: Using your own product for ‘pain point analysis’, or to identify a specific problem that prospective customers of your business are experiencing (also see: Cat Fooding — using your competitor’s product for the same reason).

Dealflow: This is a term used by finance professionals to refer to the rate at which they receive business proposals/investment offers.

Flywheel: A business concept where great effort is exerted at the beginning to gain progress, and at some point the momentum gained is enough to propel the business forwards with less effort and investment.

Workback Schedule: This is a tool used to map out a project’s lifecycle and its major phases in reverse order — that is, from the delivery date back to the start date.

White Labeling: This is a product or service produced by one company, that other companies rebrand to make it appear as if they had made it; named because a ‘white label’ on the packaging of an item can be filled in with the logo or details of another company. In tech, this might refer to a company using ready-made software to launch its own brand, with all technical issues related to platform development outsourced to the white label company.

We hope this has been helpful in getting you at least partially fluent in tech-speak — before you know it, you’ll be tearing down your MVP with first principles thinking!

Please feel free to leave any other nuggets of wisdom in the comments below — we’d love to hear more useful terms to add to our collection.