Learn to Talk About Technology Development

The Terms Every Climate Tech Founder Needs to Know About Physical Products

These are some terms that are often thrown around by the people you’ll encounter: designers, engineers, contract manufacturers, certification agencies and more.

Take a few minutes now to learn what you need to know, so that you can talk intelligently with the people you’ve partnered with to bring your idea to life.

These terms are drawn from the startup, project management and product development domains, all of which overlap to help manage the flow of work through technology development.

A—C

Acceptance Criteria / Acceptance Tests: Tests performed to ensure that the products from a production run meet contractual specifications for performance, build quality, durability and consistency.

Activities: Tasks that need to be performed in order to finish a project. It includes both learning activities to support closing Knowledge Gaps, such as experiments, and other activities to write documentation, finalize drawings, etc.

Activity Plan: A plan for tracking a team’s progress at the Activities level. It is the lowest level plan that a team uses to manage its work, and it may be done in any number of ways, from a Kanban Board to a simple to-do list.

Agile: (1) Fast, flexible and responsive to new information. (2) A set of practices and tools that attempt to realize the Agile Manifesto (3) Synonym for Agile Software Development.

Agile Software Development: A movement within the software development community to transform how teams managed software development to dramatically improve the final product. It is named for the Agile Manifesto, published in 2001, and it emphasizes ongoing customer engagement, iterative development practices, continuous delivery of working software and respect for the developers.

Batch: A set of work items processed together, at the same time.

Bill of Materials (BOM): A structured list of all the raw materials, components and subassemblies needed to assemble the product.

Build: A pre-production test to produce a fully-integrated product, or a test run of products, usually to identify errors in the product or process design.

Cadence: A regular, steady rhythm that coordinates among different elements, in the manner that a uniform beat coordinates the instruments in a band or orchestra. In the context of the Rapid Learning Cycles framework, a regular time interval in between Learning Cycle Events that establishes the “heartbeat” of the Rapid Learning Cycles framework, or the time interval between regular Status Events.

Cadenced Release Plan: A strategy for releasing products within a product family that begins with the release of a Minimum Viable Product and then times successive product enhancements to regular market pull events, such as seasonal windows or annual trade shows.

Commercial Pilot: A small production run of an MVP product for sale to lead customers to demonstrate a product’s commercial viability and provide early learnings on the need for field maintenance and support.

Computer Aided Design (CAD) Models: Virtual models of a product or its subassembly, used directly for modeling things like stresses or thermal flows, for communicating with suppliers, and for producing parts with rapid prototyping equipment.

Convergent Decision Making: A process for making a complex decision that converges to the final decision in a series of stages that reduce the number of options or scenarios in a set by probing the set for weaknesses. It is a generalization of Set-Based Concurrent Engineering to apply to more types of decisions in more problem domains.

Core Hypothesis: A short description of the vision for a product that summarizes the specific customer, technical and business objectives that the product would achieve.

Cost of Delay: The cost per day for every day a product cannot be released after its scheduled launch date. It includes lost revenue, performance penalties, extra costs for expedited shipping to fulfill commitments. For products with strong seasonality, cost of delay can be substantial.

Design Thinking: A structured process for designing a product that keeps the customer’s point-of-view at the forefront.

Design Verification Plan (DVP): A plan that spells out how each product specification will be verified prior to release to production, and which tests will be run to ensure compliance to specifications post-production.

E—K