Decode Digital Products
Your Glossary for MVP, Agile & Lean Success
The world of digital product development is dynamic and filled with specialized terminology. As you embark on the exciting journey from a raw idea to a market-ready solution, understanding the foundational concepts is paramount.
This glossary is designed to be your essential guide, demystifying the key terms that drive successful product creation – from the strategic simplicity of an MVP to the iterative power of Agile and Lean methodologies. Whether you're an entrepreneur, a startup founder, or a business leader, a clear grasp of these definitions will empower you to make informed decisions, communicate effectively with your teams, and ultimately, navigate your product's path to success with confidence.
This list provides a solid foundation for understanding the core concepts in digital product development. The field is constantly evolving, with new tools, practices, and terms emerging regularly. Consider this glossary a living document, a starting point for your continuous learning journey in building and scaling successful digital products.
Hypothesis
in Product Development
More than just an educated guess, a hypothesis in product development is the very spark of an idea, the crystallized dream of how a digital solution can solve a business's challenge, a user's problem, or unlock a new market opportunity. It's a precisely formulated assumption – "We believe [this problem exists] for [this audience/business], and [this solution] will [achieve this outcome]." This dream-turned-assumption then needs to be rigorously tested and validated through real-world experiments (like an MVP) and data, ensuring that your vision isn't just compelling, but also viable and truly desired. For us at ElGap, every great digital product begins with such a hypothesis – a dream we help you launch into reality.
Digital Product
Digital products are built using software, code, and digital interfaces. Their core purpose is to solve a specific problem, fulfill a need, or provide value to users, often by simplifying tasks, automating processes, offering information, entertainment, enabling commerce, or connecting people.
Digital Product Development
The comprehensive process of bringing a new digital product from concept to launch and through its ongoing evolution. It encompasses all stages, including ideation, research, design (UX/UI), technical development (frontend and backend), testing, deployment, and post-launch iteration. The aim is to create software-based solutions that solve user problems, provide value, and meet business objectives, often utilizing iterative and adaptive methodologies like Agile and Lean Startup.
Iteration / Iterative Development
A core principle in modern product development where work is conducted in cycles of continuous refinement and improvement. Each iteration involves building a small part of the product, testing it, gathering feedback, and using those learnings to improve the next cycle.
A Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is the simplest, functional iteration of a new product designed to gather maximum real-world feedback and validate key assumptions with minimal investment. It includes only the essential features necessary to solve a core user problem and engage early adopters.
Lean Startup methodology
A scientific approach to creating and managing startups and new products, emphasizing rapid iterative cycles of building a minimum viable product (MVP), measuring its impact on users, and learning from the data to validate or pivot product development.
Validated Learning
The process of proving (or disproving) assumptions about a product and its market through rigorous experimentation and measurement of actual user behavior. It's the goal of the "Build-Measure-Learn" loop in Lean Startup.
Agile methodology
A flexible and iterative approach to project management and software development that emphasizes collaboration, self-organizing teams, frequent adaptation to change, and continuous delivery of working software in short cycles.
Scrum
A popular Agile framework for managing and delivering complex projects, particularly in software development. Scrum organizes work into short, time-boxed iterations called "sprints" (typically 1-4 weeks), with defined roles (Product Owner, Scrum Master, Development Team) and ceremonies (sprint planning, daily stand-ups, sprint review, sprint retrospective). It emphasizes iterative progress, flexibility, collaboration, and continuous improvement to deliver valuable product increments frequently.
Scope Creep
The uncontrolled expansion or growth of a project's requirements, features, or objectives beyond its originally agreed-upon scope. It often leads to delays, increased costs, and can undermine the efficiency of methodologies like MVP and Agile.
Pivot
A fundamental change in the strategy of a startup or product, often based on validated learning from an MVP or market feedback. It involves shifting the product's direction, target market, or core value proposition to find a more viable path to success.
Rapid MVP Development
Rapid MVP Development is a focused approach and a set of principles aimed at significantly accelerating the entire process of bringing a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) from concept to launch. It's not a single, rigid methodology but rather an integration of various techniques designed to drastically reduce the time needed to get a validated, functional product into the hands of early users.
Product Roadmap
A high-level visual summary that outlines the strategic direction and evolution of a product over time. It typically shows the product's vision, major goals, initiatives, and planned features, serving as a communication tool for stakeholders rather than a detailed project plan.
Product Backlog
A prioritized, dynamic list of all known features, enhancements, bug fixes, and other items that a digital product needs. It serves as the single source of work for the development team, managed by the Product Owner (in Scrum).
User Experience (UX)
The overall experience a user has when interacting with a digital product, encompassing their feelings, attitudes, and perceptions about the system. It focuses on making the product useful, usable, and enjoyable.
User Interface (UI)
The visual and interactive elements of a digital product that users interact with, such as buttons, icons, menus, and text fields. UI design is concerned with how the product looks and feels, aiming for clarity, esthetics, and ease of use.
A/B Testing
A method of comparing two versions of a digital product element (like a webpage, button, or headline) to determine which one performs better. Users are randomly shown one of the two versions, and their interactions are measured to identify which version leads to more desirable outcomes, facilitating data-driven decision-making.
Product-Market Fit
A state where a digital product successfully satisfies a strong market demand. It signifies that the product has found a significant group of customers who genuinely need and want it, indicating a sustainable business model.
Cloud Computing (or "The Cloud")
A model for delivering computing services—including servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, and intelligence—over the Internet ("the Cloud"). Instead of owning computing infrastructure or data centers, you can access these services from a cloud provider (e.g., AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) on a pay-as-you-go basis, offering scalability, flexibility, and cost efficiency.
Dedicated Server
A physical server rented entirely by a single client or business. This provides exclusive access to all of the server's resources (CPU, RAM, storage, bandwidth), offering maximum performance, security, and customization for demanding applications and high-traffic digital products.
Virtual Private Server (VPS)
A virtualized server environment that functions like a dedicated server but resides on a single physical server shared by multiple users. Each VPS operates independently with its own operating system, dedicated resources (CPU, RAM), and root access, offering a balance between the cost-effectiveness of shared hosting and the control of a dedicated server.
Database
An organized collection of data, typically stored and accessed electronically from a computer system. Databases are essential for digital products as they allow applications to store, retrieve, update, and manage information (such as user profiles, product listings, or transaction records) efficiently and reliably. They are broadly categorized into relational (e.g., SQL databases like MySQL, PostgreSQL) and non-relational (e.g., NoSQL databases like MongoDB, Cassandra) types, each suited for different data structures and needs.
CI/CD
Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery/Deployment
A set of practices that automates the integration of code changes, testing, and delivery/deployment processes.
- Continuous Integration (CI): Developers frequently merge their code changes into a central repository, where automated builds and tests are run. This helps detect and address integration issues early.
- Continuous Delivery (CD): An extension of CI, ensuring that code changes are consistently built, tested, and ready for release to production at any time.
- Continuous Deployment (CD): Further automates Continuous Delivery by automatically releasing every validated code change to production, without manual intervention.
Containerization
An operating system-level virtualization method used to deploy and run distributed applications without launching an entire virtual machine for each. It packages an application and all its dependencies (libraries, configuration files, etc.) into a self-contained unit called a "container," ensuring it runs consistently across different computing environments (e.g., development, testing, production). Docker is a popular platform for containerization.
Monolithic Architecture
A traditional software design approach where an entire application is built as a single, indivisible, and tightly coupled unit. All components, from the user interface and business logic to data access, are bundled together in a single codebase and deployed as a single executable. While often simpler to start with for smaller projects, monoliths can become complex and difficult to scale or update as the application grows, in contrast to the modularity of microservices.
Microservices Architecture
An architectural style where a single application is developed as a suite of small, independent services, each running in its own process and communicating with lightweight mechanisms (often APIs). Each service is built around a specific business capability, can be deployed independently, and is managed by a small, dedicated team, offering greater agility, scalability, and resilience compared to traditional monolithic architectures.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
he practice of managing and provisioning computing infrastructure (such as networks, virtual machines, load balancers, and connections) using code rather than manual processes. IaC tools (e.g., Terraform, Ansible) allow infrastructure to be treated like software, enabling automation, version control, consistency, and repeatability in provisioning and management.
Frontend (Client-Side)
Refers to everything a user directly sees and interacts with in a digital product (e.g., a website, mobile app, or software). It encompasses the visual design, user interface (UI), and all interactive elements that run directly in the user's browser or device. Frontend development uses languages like HTML (for structure), CSS (for styling), and JavaScript (for interactivity) to create the user experience.
Backend (Server-Side)
Refers to the "behind-the-scenes" part of a digital product that users don't directly see. It's the core logic, databases, servers, and APIs that power the frontend. The backend handles data storage and retrieval, user authentication, business logic, and ensures the product functions correctly and securely. It's built using various programming languages (e.g., Python, Java, Node.js, PHP) and frameworks, managing interactions between the application, database, and server.