MBA Glossary.

Agile is an iterative approach to project management and software development that prioritises working output, cross-functional collaboration, and responsiveness to change over rigid upfront planning.

Anchoring is a cognitive bias where the first number or offer introduced in a negotiation disproportionately influences all subsequent judgments.

BATNA stands for Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement — the course of action you will take if current negotiations fail.

Blue Ocean Strategy is the pursuit of uncontested market space — creating demand rather than fighting over existing demand in crowded, competitive 'red ocean' markets.

Brand architecture is the strategic framework that defines how a company's portfolio of brands, products, and sub-brands relate to and reinforce one another.

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is the total sales and marketing expenditure required to acquire one new customer over a given period.

CAC Payback Period is the number of months required for a new customer's contribution margin to repay the cost of acquiring them.

A capitalisation table (cap table) tracks all of a company's equity ownership — founders, employees, investors, and option pools — including ownership percentages, share classes, and dilution effects of each funding round.

Category creation is the strategy of defining an entirely new market category around your product rather than competing for position within an existing one.

Churn rate is the percentage of customers or revenue lost over a given period — arguably the single most important health metric for subscription businesses.

A competitive moat is a durable structural advantage that protects a business from competitors.

Contribution margin is the revenue remaining after variable costs are subtracted — the portion of each sale that contributes to covering fixed costs and ultimately generating profit.

Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) is a valuation method that estimates the present value of an asset by projecting its future cash flows and discounting them at a rate reflecting the time value of money and risk.

EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortisation) is a proxy for a company's core operating profitability, stripping out financing decisions and accounting treatments to enable cleaner comparison across companies.

The flywheel effect describes a self-reinforcing business loop where growth in one area generates momentum that accelerates growth in another, compounding over time.

Funnel analysis tracks the conversion rate of users through each sequential stage of a defined journey — from awareness to acquisition, activation, retention, and revenue — to identify where drop-off is highest.

Growth accounting decomposes a company's user or revenue growth into its component sources: new acquisition, resurrection of churned users, and loss from churn.

Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) is a framework for understanding customer motivation — the underlying functional, social, or emotional 'job' a customer hires a product to accomplish.

Lean methodology is an operational philosophy originating in the Toyota Production System that relentlessly eliminates waste — any activity that consumes resources without creating customer value.

The Lean Startup methodology, developed by Eric Ries, applies lean principles to new venture building — emphasising rapid experimentation, validated learning, and iterative product releases to reduce the time and capital required to find a viable business model.

Lifetime Value (LTV) is the total net revenue a business can expect from a single customer over the entire duration of their relationship.

MECE (Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive) is a problem-structuring principle originating at McKinsey that requires any breakdown of a problem or options to have no overlaps and no gaps.

A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is the simplest version of a product that allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.

Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures customer loyalty by asking one question: 'How likely are you to recommend this product to a friend?' on a 0–10 scale, then subtracting the percentage of Detractors from Promoters.

A North Star Metric is the single metric that best captures the core value a product delivers to its customers, serving as the primary long-term growth indicator for the entire organisation.

OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) is a goal-setting framework that links ambitious qualitative objectives to measurable quantitative outcomes, typically on a quarterly cadence.

An onboarding framework is a structured programme for integrating new employees during their first 30, 60, or 90 days — covering culture immersion, role clarity, relationship building, and early milestone-setting.

Porter's Five Forces is a framework for analysing the competitive intensity and profitability potential of an industry by examining supplier power, buyer power, threat of substitutes, threat of new entrants, and rivalry among existing competitors.

A positioning statement is a concise internal declaration that defines a product's target customer, the category it competes in, its unique benefit, and the reason to believe that claim.

A pre-mortem is a prospective risk technique where a team imagines that a plan has already failed, then works backward to identify what caused the failure.

Price anchoring is the deliberate placement of a reference price — typically a higher-tier option — that makes subsequent prices feel more reasonable by comparison.

Product-Led Growth (PLG) is a go-to-market strategy where the product itself is the primary driver of customer acquisition, conversion, and expansion — rather than a traditional sales or marketing-led motion.

Product-market fit is the degree to which a product satisfies a strong, pre-existing market demand — the point at which a meaningful segment of users would be genuinely disappointed if the product disappeared.

Psychological safety is the shared belief within a team that members will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes.

The Pyramid Principle is a communication framework developed by Barbara Minto at McKinsey that structures arguments by leading with the conclusion, then supporting it with grouped, logical evidence.

A RACI Matrix maps every task or decision to four roles: Responsible (does the work), Accountable (owns the outcome), Consulted (provides input), and Informed (kept in the loop).

Roadmap prioritisation is the discipline of deciding which product features or initiatives to build next, using structured frameworks like RICE (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort) or the Kano model to make trade-offs explicit and defensible.

SBI is a structured feedback framework that describes the specific Situation in which a behaviour occurred, the observable Behaviour itself, and the Impact it had on the team or work.

SCQA (Situation-Complication-Question-Answer) is a narrative framework developed by Barbara Minto that structures communication by establishing the current Situation, introducing a Complication that creates tension, posing the Question that tension raises, and delivering the Answer.

Second-order thinking is the discipline of asking not just 'what happens next?' but 'what happens after that?' — tracing the downstream consequences of decisions beyond their immediate, obvious effects.

Span of control refers to the number of direct reports a manager effectively oversees — a key variable in organisational design.

A structured interview is a hiring process in which every candidate is asked the same predetermined questions in the same order, and responses are scored against a consistent rubric.

The sunk cost fallacy is the tendency to continue investing in a failing course of action because of resources already spent, rather than the expected value of future returns.

SWOT Analysis is a structured planning framework that evaluates a business's internal Strengths and Weaknesses alongside external Opportunities and Threats.

Unit economics measures the direct revenues and costs associated with a single unit of business — typically one customer, one transaction, or one subscription — to determine whether the underlying business model is fundamentally sound.

Value-based pricing is a strategy that sets prices according to the perceived or quantified value delivered to the customer, rather than cost-plus margins or competitor benchmarking.

Values operationalisation is the practice of translating abstract cultural values into concrete, observable behaviours that can be hired for, rewarded, and used in performance conversations.

Venture capital funding rounds (Pre-seed, Seed, Series A, B, C and beyond) represent progressive stages of institutional investment, each with different typical check sizes, dilution expectations, and return requirements.

Willingness to pay (WTP) is the maximum price a customer would accept before choosing an alternative — and understanding it by segment is the prerequisite for any value-based pricing strategy.

ZOPA (Zone of Possible Agreement) is the range between each party's reservation price — the overlap where a deal is mutually acceptable.