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Glossary

Terms founders
actually ask about.

20 definitions written with conviction. MVP, Fractional CTO, RAG, multi-tenant SaaS, vibe coding, flat-price engagement. Not the neutral Wikipedia version — we take a position and call out where the conventional take is wrong.

Why this exists

Most glossary content on the web is SEO filler — paraphrased Wikipedia, no opinion, no specifics. Founders making real decisions need definitions with a point of view.

20

Terms

2026

Cost numbers

0

Neutral takes

The opinion problem

Most glossary content is
SEO filler.

Paraphrased Wikipedia. No specifics. No real opinion. We define terms the way a senior engineer would explain them to a founder during a real conversation — with cost numbers, tradeoffs, and a position.

Category

Core concepts

4 terms

Core concepts

MVP

Minimum Viable Product — the smallest version of a product that can be deployed to real users and tested as a hypothesis.

See mvp definition

Core concepts

Product–Market Fit

The point where a product creates strong, repeating demand from a defined audience without paid acquisition carrying it.

See product–market fit definition

Core concepts

Runway

The number of months until your bank balance hits zero at current burn.

See runway definition

Core concepts

North Star Metric

The single metric that best captures whether your product is delivering value.

See north star metric definition

Category

Engagement model

4 terms

Engagement model

Fractional CTO

A senior technical leader engaged part-time — typically 10–30 hours per month — to make architecture decisions, run hiring loops, review code, and own the technical roadmap without a full-time salary or equity commitment..

See fractional cto definition

Engagement model

Flat-price engagement

An engineering engagement where the price is quoted as a single number after scoping, not as an hourly rate.

See flat-price engagement definition

Engagement model

Retainer

A recurring monthly engagement where a vendor reserves a chunk of capacity for you.

See retainer definition

Engagement model

Scoping Call

A short call (30 minutes is the right length) that turns a vague product idea into a written scope the vendor can quote flat-price against.

See scoping call definition

Category

Engineering patterns

4 terms

Engineering patterns

Multi-tenant SaaS

A SaaS architecture where multiple customers (tenants) share the same application instance and database, with data isolation enforced at the row level.

See multi-tenant saas definition

Engineering patterns

Monorepo

Multiple related projects (frontend, backend, shared libs, mobile) in a single Git repo.

See monorepo definition

Engineering patterns

Feature Flags

Code paths gated by a runtime configuration switch, used to enable/disable features without redeploying.

See feature flags definition

Engineering patterns

CI/CD

Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment — the pipeline that runs tests on every commit and deploys passing code to production automatically.

See ci/cd definition

Category

AI & machine learning

4 terms

AI & machine learning

RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)

A pattern for LLM applications that retrieves relevant information from a knowledge base before generating an answer, so the model cites real data instead of hallucinating from its training set.

See rag (retrieval-augmented generation) definition

AI & machine learning

Vibe coding

Coding by feel with an AI assistant — accept whatever the model generates, prompt for fixes when something breaks, iterate without architecture or planning.

See vibe coding definition

AI & machine learning

AI-native engineering

An engineering workflow where AI agents do the boilerplate work while the engineer focuses on architecture, security, and edge cases.

See ai-native engineering definition

AI & machine learning

Prompt Engineering

The craft of writing prompts that get reliable, useful outputs from an LLM.

See prompt engineering definition

Category

Infra & ops

4 terms

Infra & ops

Speakable schema

A schema.org markup that tells Google Assistant and voice search engines which parts of a page should be read aloud as the answer.

See speakable schema definition

Infra & ops

Google Indexing API

An API that lets you ping Google when a URL is added, updated, or removed — so it gets crawled in hours instead of waiting for sitemap discovery.

See google indexing api definition

Infra & ops

Edge runtime

A serverless execution environment that runs code geographically close to the user (in CDN points-of-presence), with cold-start latency in single-digit milliseconds.

See edge runtime definition

Infra & ops

Observability

The ability to understand what your system is doing in production without shipping new code.

See observability definition

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