14. "Start-Up Lingo"

When you start a new job, you are suddenly thrown into a new world of puzzling words and acronyms. This is especially true when you jump from academia to industry, it is like a new language. I didn’t know if a Jira was a person, software, cafe or programming language. Same as an Alteryx. This week I give you the basics of the start-up lingo to help you feel part of the team sooner!

My Experience of Start-Up Lingo

The first few weeks of any job are daunting. For every workplace, there are new acronyms you need to learn, and after someone has taken the time to explain something to you once, you don’t really want to keep asking your colleagues to explain it again. So ask me : )

This list can be your cheat sheet for the basics of start-up lingo and terminology. This list is by no means comprehensive. I have only listed the programs I have used in start-ups and describe its functionality how I used it, it may do many other impressive things, but I didn't use it in that way.

The List of Start-Up Lingo: Common Terms, Meetings and Scrum

List disclaimer: this list is not exhaustive and will only describe the aspects of the program I am familiar with. I am sure there are many words I am missing, tell me and I will add them to the list.

For this list, I will write the terminology, start-up word, in bold, followed by the pronunciation in brackets (if pronunciation is not as it sounds), followed by a brief description of my experience of the word.

• Back-end / front-end - the back-end comprises all the code that creates the program/software your company creates, only employees (primarily programmers) have access to the back end. The front-end is the version of the software your customers see.

• Daily stand up - a daily 10-minute meeting where all team members literally stand up to discuss their work plan for that day. The point of this meeting is to identify any potential roadblocks to prevent any team member from completing their work plan. If a roadblock is identified the team works together to solve it.

• Dev - developer.

• Kanban board - a fancy to-do list. Imagine a board with multiple columns representing various stages of work, heading columns may include: ‘to do’, ‘working on’, ‘completed’. Originally kanban boards were comprised of writing a task on a post-it note, and sticking it on the wall so all the programmers know what tasks they need to complete. To ensure no two programmers worked on the same task, a dev would remove the post-it note from the wall and work on it. Kanban boards are a digitised version of this process.

• Offline - to decide to speak about a topic raised (usually during another meeting) at another time, in a different meeting. For example, you have a meeting about the functionality of software, but issues relating to the back-end arise. The relevant people will discuss the back-end issue at another time and use this meeting to focus on functionality.

• OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) - Google uses OKRs to motivate their team to keep on achieving and thriving. These are performance goals that are not linked to remuneration. They are meant to be stretch goals, that you will likely fail. But failing still gets you closer to your overall goal, and you learn more about your goal through failure.

• Pain point - the frustrations experienced by yourself, clients or colleagues by using your program or the frustration your program is trying to solve. For example, “this iteration of the software will solve the researchers pain point of having to reformat their references when they resubmit their paper”. (This is a made-up example, but wouldn’t this be an amazing software package?!?)

• Push back - the scope of a project has been determined, then the client asks for additional work. Push-back is the art of discussing the original scope, comparing it to the new scope, and discussing options moving forward. From the company's perspective, it is about not agreeing to deliver additional work, unless the client pays more to include the additional work in the project. It is essentially a negotiation, or re-negotiation, to reduce the number of tasks or the scope of work you need to complete. You can push back on a client, a work colleague or a manager. For example, “I pushed back on the additional cohort they wanted to add into the analysis”.

• Retro - short for retrospective. A meeting held at the end of a project to ask some or all of the following questions:

  • What went well?

  • What did not go well?

  • What did we learn? and/or

  • What should we do differently next time?

• Scrum - a methodology to produce software. Many start-ups use this methodology (if you are interested read this book, I found it really interesting! Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time). Scrum emphasises having a functional AND demonstrable product to show relevant stakeholders to get their feedback on what is good, what needs to be developed and what is missing. Scrum builds a functional base product, and then iterates to figure out exactly what the customer needs.

As Scrum is implemented in many start-ups, it it important you understand that roles of Scrum. But note, each workplace will likely implement Scrum in a different way so make sure you know how your workplace also uses these terms. For example, at one start-up three people shared the Product Owner and Scrum Master roles. This is definitely not the endorsed Scrum approach. Scrum advocates one person for each of these roles.

• Scrum role: Product Owner - the person with the vision for the software. They decide what features will be added or removed from the software, and in what order based on the customer's priorities or difficulty to build/remove/improve a feature. They are in constant communication with stakeholders and let them know about progress and expected time until the final product is ready.

• Scrum role: Scrum Master - person dedicated to enhancing the efficiency of the dev team. This can include technical and non-technical solutions, e.g. increasing data access for the entire team by moving all data to a cloud server; or, moving the water cooler away from the dev team so they didn’t get distracted by their colleagues' conversations. All of these solutions fall under the scrum master role.

• Scrum role: Development Team (aka ‘dev team’) - the technical team that completes the tasks the product owner and scrum master assign for a specific time period. These people bring up any issues they encounter for the Scrum Master to solve.

• UX (user experience) - putting yourself in the customer's shoes, focusing on how the customer experiences the product and trying to improve their experience.

The List of Start-Up Lingo: Software

Not surprisingly, start-ups embrace software. It is likely your start-up will use multiple software packages to solve their pain points, here are just a few of them. For more info, click on the link to access the software's website. Many of these software companies provide free trials if you want to see how the product compares to the ones you use.

Communication programs

• Confluence (con-flu-ence) - Confluence, Jira and Trello are products from the same company, Atlassian. Confluence is like a company Wikipedia page. Employees can write up ‘how to’ articles, or give background information to a project that is then available company-wide, and even after the person leaves the company. Anyone can contribute to the page, and it should be accessible for all persons who need to know that information. You can also restrict pages to specific persons within the company.

• Microsoft Teams - internal communication tool where you can attach emails and have direct messaging conversations with specific team members about a project. This is a website, and an app accessible via laptop, desktop computer or your smart phone. You can also do video chat, and change your status to let other team members know when you are available or in meetings throughout the day.

• Slack - internal communication tool where you can attach emails, have direct conversations with specific team members, create project ‘channels’ where everything to do with a specific project is discussed in this one place. You can also change your status to let other team members know when you are available or in meetings throughout the day, and specifically update what you are currently doing with emojis. You can also do video calls. This is a website, and an app accessible via laptop, desktop computer or your smart phone.

Data or work flow visualisation programs

• Alteryx (Al-ter-icks) - data flow and visualisation program. You can upload an Excel spreadsheet into Alteryx, manipulate the data and create a data flow demonstrating how you have changed these data, save the spreadsheet and then upload the new, changed data into another program. You can save the data flow so all members know exactly what has been changed. If this data manipulation is required consistently, you can also automate this process.

• Tableau (tab-low) - a data manipulation and interactive data visualisation software package.

Data repository

• GitHub (git-hub) - a code repository where the dev team saves all of their code for the software. All team members have access to it and the latest version. If they need to update the code, then the dev will download it, change it, then resave it as the master copy so everyone in the team has access to the updated version.

Password software

• DashLane - an app, website and Google Chrome extension that saves all of your passwords for websites, bank cards for online shopping, and other notes you want to save. It will generate passwords for you based on any parameters you wish, to ensure your passwords are complicated and difficult to crack. You can also share your work passwords internally safely.

• LastPass - a free app, website and Google Chrome extension that saves all of your passwords for websites, bank cards for online shopping, and other notes you want to save. It will generate passwords for you based on any parameters you wish, to ensure your passwords are complicated and difficult to crack. The capabilities increase if you purchase the premium version of LastPass, which I have not used.

Statistical packages/languages

These programs largely fall into two categories: those that can do statistical analyses with limited data visualisation functionality OR those with minimal statistical analysis functionality with beautiful data visualisation. In the examples below, data flow is a step-by-step visualisation demonstrating how the data changes at each step of the data flow.

• R (ar) - free statistical program to analyse data and visualise the results.

• Python (py-thon) - statistical program to analyse data and visualise the results.

• Alteryx (al-ter-icks) - data manipulation program that creates a data flow for a project so you can recreate the analysis, or automate the data manipulation, with limited statistical analysis functionality.

• Knime (ny-m) - data manipulation program has the capability of data manipulation, demonstrating the data flow for a project and limited statistical analysis functionality.

• SAS (sass) - statistical program commonly used in government, financial and university research environments with limited visualisation functionality.

• STATA (stay-ta) - statistical program commonly used in government and university research environments with data visualisation functionality.

• SQL (pronounced S-Q-L or se-quel) - data manipulation program that allows you to with limited statistical analysis functionality. For example, for one project I asked a programmer to set the data up in the structure I needed, then I extracted the relevant data to SAS. I was unable to complete the data manipulation in SAS as the dataset was large, I was working remotely, and my queries kept on timing out.

Task-based software

• Asana (a-sa-na) - a program that allows you to put all the to-do tasks in a list and assign tasks to specific individuals in the team.

• Cascade - program management tool to organise project deadlines, assign tasks to people and demonstrate the proportion of the project that has been completed.

• Jira (ji-ra) - Confluence, Jira and Trello are products from the same company, Atlassian. Jira is presented as a kanban board which all team members have access to. Jira is predominantly used by the product owner, scrum master and development team to organise the tasks they will complete in a specific time period. Non-dev employees can add a ticket to Jira, and it will be reviewed and added to a dev’s Jira board if relevant.

• Salesforce - a customer relationship management (CRM) program. This program can track project milestones and end dates, create to do lists per project and assign to different team members with unique due dates, it can also record hours worked on projects, and individuals kanban boards.

• TaskRay - a CRM that allows you to track tasks, deadlines, who is assigned the task. They also have a kanban board feature so you know what tasks have been assigned to you.

• Trello (trel-o) - Confluence, Jira and Trello are products from the same company, Atlassian. Trello can track project tasks, assign specific task to team members. It allows all team members to see what tasks everyone has been assigned.

Timesheet programs

• Harvest - software that allows you to track the number of hours you spend on a project.

• Salesforce - described above, program also has this functionality.

What words are commonly used in your workplace that I have missed? Did you have any start-up lingo faux pas? Let me know by leaving a comment below or emailing me at AuthenticResearchExperiences@gmail.com

BB

Photo by Zhen Hu on Unsplash

Related Posts

'Starry-Eyed for Start-Ups?'

'Looking For A Start-Up Career?'

I will write a new post every Friday about another aspect of the research world. Please email me to subscribe to my blog. AuthenticResearchExperiences@gmail.com

I am also an avid reader of start-up stories, or research a passionate person has embarked upon across all topics. Click here If you want some new book recommendations.