Product and Building
This domain covers what you build, in what order, and how you decide when something is finished enough to put in front of someone. It is where the strongest instincts of technical founders can work against them, because building is the comfortable part and it is easy to build for a long time without learning anything. The concepts here cover scoping, sequencing, and the terms that separate genuine product judgment from shipping quickly.
10 concepts in Product and Building
- Cohort RetentionThe share of a group of users who started at the same time and are still active after a given period, measured per group rather than across the whole user base.
- ChurnThe rate at which customers stop paying you, counted either as customers lost (logo churn) or as revenue lost (revenue churn), which can differ sharply.
- Minimum Viable Product (MVP)The smallest thing you can build that produces a real answer to the riskiest question about your business, not the smallest version of the product you intend to build.
- Prototype vs. MVPA prototype tests whether an idea is feasible or desirable without anyone actually using it for real work; an MVP is a real, usable product that tests the riskiest business assumption with real usage.
- North Star MetricThe one metric that best captures the value your product delivers to customers, chosen so that moving it reliably means the business is getting healthier.
- ActivationThe point at which a new user first experiences the product's core value, not signing up, not logging in, but doing the specific thing that makes them understand why the product exists.
- Feature PrioritizationThe discipline of deciding what to build next using explicit, comparable criteria, rather than by whoever asked most recently or most loudly.
- Net Promoter Score (NPS)A single survey question (how likely are you to recommend this to a colleague, on a 0–10 scale) reduced to one score by subtracting the share of detractors (0–6) from the share of promoters (9–10).
- Product Roadmap vs. BacklogA roadmap communicates the sequenced themes and outcomes you intend to pursue and why; a backlog is the working inventory of every discrete piece of work that could feed into it, prioritized but not promised.
- Technical DebtThe accumulated cost of past shortcuts in how the product was built, code that works today but makes every future change slower, riskier, or more expensive than it would be if built properly.
Other topics
Put product and building to work on your own company
Reading the vocabulary is the easy half. Lev works through the whole arc with you, and explains the terms as they come up in your own documents.
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