Account manager: The primary point of contact between an agency and client, responsible for managing the relationship, ensuring deliverables meet expectations, and handling communications.
Agile: An iterative approach to project management emphasizing flexible planning, evolutionary development, early delivery, and continuous improvement.
Agency: A company that provides specialized services, in this context digital product design and development services.

B-team: A secondary or less experienced team, often contrasted with the "A-team" or star performers.
Bait-and-switch: A tactic where an agency presents their best talent during the pitch but assigns different, often less experienced, team members to the actual project.
Benchmarks: Standard points of reference against which performance or achievements can be measured.
Bottom-up innovation: New ideas and initiatives that originate from employees at lower levels of an organization, rather than from top management.
Business design: The practice of applying design methodologies to business strategy and organizational challenges, focusing on creating viable business models and improving organizational effectiveness.
Bureaucracy: Complex administrative procedures that can slow down decision-making and project progress.

Cannibalization: When a new product or service reduces sales or market share of an existing product or service from the same company.
Change management: The process of helping an organization and its employees adapt to significant changes in the business.
Contingency plan: A course of action designed to help an organization respond effectively to a significant future event or situation that may or may not happen.
Cultural fit: The alignment of values, attitudes, and practices between an organization and its agency partner.

Design thinking: A human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer's toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.
Digital native: Companies or products that were created in the digital era and primarily operate through digital channels.
Digital product: A software-based product or service that provides value to users through digital interfaces.
Discovery: The initial phase of a project focused on understanding user needs, business requirements, and technical constraints before beginning development.
Disruption: A significant change in an industry or market, often caused by new technology or business models.

Exit strategy: A plan for ending a business relationship or project, including how to handle data, intellectual property, and ongoing maintenance.

Fixed-price contract: An agreement where the agency is paid a set amount for the entire project, regardless of the time or resources used.
FOMO: Anxiety that an exciting or interesting event may currently be happening elsewhere.

Gatekeeper: Someone who controls access to information or resources within an organization.

Innovator’s Dilemma: A concept explaining why successful companies may struggle to adopt new technologies or business models that initially seem less profitable.
Intellectual property: Creations of the mind, such as inventions, designs, software, or processes, that are protected by law.
Iteration: The process of repeatedly refining a product or design based on feedback and testing.

Knowledge transfer: The structured process of transferring skills, expertise, and project information from an agency to the client’s team.
KPI: Measurable values that demonstrate how effectively a company is achieving key business objectives.

Minimum Viable Product (MVP): A product with enough features to attract early-adopter customers and validate a product idea early in the development cycle.

NDA: A legal contract that outlines confidential material or knowledge that parties wish to share with one another but restrict from wider use or dissemination.

Pivot: A significant change in business strategy based on customer feedback or market conditions.
Product owner: A role in Agile development responsible for defining product features, prioritizing the backlog, and ensuring the product delivers value to users.
Product-market fit: The degree to which a product satisfies strong market demand.
Proprietary information: Confidential information that gives a company a competitive advantage.
Prototype: An early sample, model, or release of a product built to test a concept or process.

Reference client: A previous or current client who can speak to an agency’s capabilities and performance, often used during the agency selection process.
Risk sharing: An arrangement where both the client and the agency share the financial risks of a project.
ROI: A performance measure used to evaluate the efficiency of an investment or compare the efficiency of several different investments.
Runway: The amount of time a company can operate before running out of money, typically calculated by dividing current capital by monthly expenses.

Scope creep: The gradual expansion of a project’s scope without corresponding adjustments to time, budget, or resources, often leading to delays and cost overruns.
Self-disruption: When a company intentionally introduces a new product or service that may cannibalize its existing offerings.
Service design: The practice of planning and organizing people, infrastructure, communication, and material components of a service to improve its quality and the interaction between service provider and customers.
Stakeholder: Any person, group, or organization that has an interest in or can affect/be affected by a project.
Steering group: A committee that provides high-level oversight and decision-making for a project.
Sunk cost fallacy: The tendency to continue investing in something because of past investments, despite new evidence suggesting that it’s no longer the best course of action.

T&M: A billing method where clients pay for the actual time spent on the project plus any materials used, usually billed at predetermined hourly rates.
Technical debt: The implied cost of additional rework caused by choosing a limited solution now instead of using a better approach that would take longer.
Token bidder: A company invited to participate in a bidding process merely to satisfy procurement requirements, without a genuine chance of winning the contract.
Top-down: Referring to decision-making or management approaches that originate from upper management and flow down through the organization.

UI: The visual elements of a product or website that users interact with.
UX: The overall experience of a person using a product, especially in terms of how easy or pleasing it is to use.

Value-based pricing: A pricing strategy where fees are tied to specific business outcomes or metrics rather than time spent, often including risk-sharing between agency and client.

Waterfall: A linear sequential approach to software development, where progress flows steadily downwards through phases like design, implementation, and testing.
Walled garden: A closed or exclusive ecosystem where the service provider has control over applications, content, and media, and restricts convenient access to non-approved applications or content.