The words
I use.
Sixteen terms that carry a specific meaning here. Most of them are ordinary words used precisely, which is worse than jargon if nobody says which precision.
Decision log
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Four lines written the day a decision is made: what was decided, why, what was rejected, and what would change it. Ten minutes a week, and it ends an entire category of repeated argument.
Most repeated arguments are not disagreement. They are people genuinely remembering the same meeting differently, and without a record the loudest or most recent version wins.
Why does your team keep redoing the same work? Stage 04 — Make it repeatable
Eight-second test
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Show your homepage to five people for eight seconds, hide it, and ask what the product does. If two are wrong, the problem is what you’re saying rather than how many people you’re reaching.
Costs an afternoon and settles an argument that otherwise gets answered with an advertising budget.
Execution-only work
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Design work where the thinking is already done and only hands are needed. Better given to somebody hired directly, cheaper, faster, and closer to the product than an outside consultant can be.
Paying an outside designer to execute an agreed plan is paying a premium for friction.
Nine conversations
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The cheap version of research: nine people, one afternoon, asked only about the last time the problem happened to them, with no mention of your product.
Any question about the future produces a polite guess. Past behaviour is checkable.
Why is nobody using your product? Stage 01 — Worth building?
One-way door
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A decision you live with rather than reverse: pricing customers have seen, a hire, a market, a promise made in public. Everything built afterwards inherits its shape.
The failure mode here is not haste. It’s agreement — nobody in the room disagreeing is a reason to look outside it.
Should you decide this now, or think longer? Stage 05 — Charging for it
Polite no
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Enthusiasm expressed after a demo, with no existing workaround behind it and no repeat use after it. It’s indistinguishable from real interest at the moment it happens, which is what makes it expensive.
“That’s interesting” is what a considerate person says instead of “no”.
Repeat use
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Somebody doing the thing again, on their own, without you in the room. It’s the only usage signal worth trusting, because every other one can be produced by politeness or curiosity.
A demo generates enthusiasm. A second unprompted visit generates evidence.
Reversible decision
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One you could undo quickly and quietly, where almost nobody outside the team would notice and nothing else gets built on top. How long a decision deserves depends on this, not on how important it feels.
The test is whether you can say how you would undo it in one sentence. If you cannot, it’s not reversible — you are hoping it is.
Should you decide this now, or think longer? Stage 02 — First version
Scope creep by agreement
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How first versions grow: every item comes back with a good reason attached, nobody loses the argument, and small reasonable victories accumulate until the release takes months.
You never lose an argument about scope. That’s the problem.
Smallest version
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The least you can build that still answers the question you’re actually asking. Not a demo — usable by somebody who is not you.
Deciding what this version has to prove, in one sentence, before deciding what it contains.
Switching cost
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What it costs somebody to move from what they use today to what you built, data, habit, and being slower for a week in exchange for being faster later.
Most people will not take that trade even when the maths is obviously in their favour, which is why removing setup steps beats adding features.
The five reasons
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The five explanations for a flat usage graph after launch: nobody saw it, they saw it and did not understand it, they understood it and did not need it, they needed it but moving was too much work, or they tried it and it’s not good enough yet.
They look identical in analytics and their fixes point in opposite directions, which is why diagnosis is cheaper than effort.
The second person
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Somebody other than your first enthusiastic user who describes the same problem unprompted. One person with a problem is an anecdote; two who found it independently is a pattern.
If you cannot name them, you’re not ready to build.
Was that feedback real, or just polite? Stage 01 — Worth building?
Thin signal
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A request or a compliment with nothing underneath it: no workaround, no repeat use, no measurable cost to ignoring it. Roadmaps built on thin signals never end, because preferences are infinite.
“No good reason to refuse” is not a reason to build.
Willingness to pay
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Whether somebody would actually hand over money, which usage does not measure. The strongest signal is somebody asking what it costs before you bring price up.
Free users tolerate things paying users will not, so a large free audience tells you almost nothing about a price.
Workaround
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The ugly, manual thing somebody already does to cope with a problem, a spreadsheet, a group chat, a recurring reminder. It’s the strongest evidence a problem is real, because nobody maintains one for fun.
When you ask what somebody does about a problem today and the honest answer is “nothing”, you’re usually looking at a preference rather than a need.
Was that feedback real, or just polite? Stage 01 — Worth building?