Resources
The glossary: plain answers.
Enterprise software, loyalty, logistics and AI terms — defined the way we’d explain them in a meeting.
A–Z
Terms we get asked about.
- API (Application Programming Interface)
- The contract by which software talks to software. Well-designed APIs are versioned, documented and predictable.
- Characterisation test
- A test that pins down what a legacy system currently does — bugs included — so you notice the moment a change alters behaviour.
- Churn
- Customers leaving. The metric loyalty and retention programmes exist to move — measurable only against a holdout.
- CI/CD
- Continuous integration / continuous delivery: every change automatically tested and shippable. The precondition for routine deploys.
- Core Web Vitals
- Google’s user-experience speed metrics (LCP, CLS, INP). We treat them as budgets with build-failing enforcement.
- Dead-letter queue
- Where messages go when processing fails repeatedly — so failures are visible and replayable instead of silently lost.
- Dedicated team
- A stable cross-functional team working your roadmap with the vendor’s delivery system. Capacity plus governance.
- Dual-write
- Writing to old and new systems in parallel during migration, with reconciliation — evidence before cutover.
- Empty miles
- Distance trucks drive without cargo. Pure cost; the number network optimisation attacks.
- Eval (AI evaluation)
- A frozen test set plus scoring that turns “the AI seems good” into a number that gates releases.
- Golden master
- Recorded real inputs and outputs of a system, used as ground truth while re-engineering it.
- Idempotency
- The property that doing something twice has the same effect as once — what makes retries safe.
- KVKK
- Türkiye’s Personal Data Protection Law (No. 6698). Sibling of GDPR; both implemented as architecture in our work.
- LLM (Large Language Model)
- AI models that read and produce text. Production value comes from the engineering around them: grounding, evals, guardrails, cost control.
- Loyalty liability
- The balance-sheet value of unredeemed points. Real money; tracked to finance-grade accuracy in serious programmes.
- MDF (Market Development Funds)
- Vendor money for partner marketing. Ungoverned, it leaks; governed, it’s a growth lever.
- MVP (Minimum Viable Product)
- The smallest product that tests your riskiest assumption with real users. A scoping discipline, not a quality discount.
- Next-best-action
- Models choosing the most valuable offer/message per customer per moment — the engine behind modern personalisation.
- OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness)
- Manufacturing’s composite of availability × performance × quality. Visibility alone typically buys several points.
- Outbox pattern
- Writing state and event in one transaction, then publishing — eliminating the dual-write race in event-driven systems.
- Parallel run
- Old and new systems computing side by side until outputs agree. How books of record migrate without faith.
- RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)
- Grounding LLM answers in your documents via retrieval — with citations, so answers are checkable.
- SLO (Service Level Objective)
- A reliability target you engineer against (e.g. 99.9%), with error budgets deciding when to slow down.
- SPM (Sales Performance Management)
- Territories, quotas, crediting and incentive calculation — governed. The spreadsheet’s professional replacement.
- Staff augmentation
- Engineers embedded in your team under your direction. Capacity, fast — with vetting as the product.
- Strangler pattern
- Modernising by growing new services around a legacy system and shifting traffic gradually until retirement. Named after fig trees; kinder to businesses.
- Tier prediction
- ML that flags loyalty members trending toward upgrade or churn — so offers land before the status letter would.
- TMS (Transportation Management System)
- The planning/execution/settlement layer for freight. ROI lives or dies on adoption physics.
A term we should add?
Tell us what confused a meeting — we’ll define it plainly and credit the question.
✓ No pitch deck✓ AI-native engineer on the call✓ Written follow-up