The PM Vocabulary Sheet with Ashutosh Rai

You don't need to memorise every PM buzzword. You need to understand the ones you might actually be asked about.

The PM Vocabulary Sheet is a quick-reference guide to the Product terms a first-time PM candidate is most likely to encounter.

No dictionary-style definitions.

No 200-term glossary.

Just the terms that are actually useful, explained in plain English + why they matter.

Inside, you'll find ~35 terms across:

DISCOVERY & USERS

→ User persona

→ Jobs-to-be-done

→ Pain point

→ User research

→ Insight

→ Use case

→ Edge case

→ User story

→ Discovery

Each term is explained simply, with examples where they help. For example, the guide distinguishes an actual insight from merely observing that a metric is low.

PRIORITISATION & DELIVERY

→ MVP

→ Roadmap

→ Backlog

→ Scope creep

→ Trade-off

→ RICE

→ PRD

→ Acceptance criteria

→ Sprint / Agile

→ Stakeholder

The focus isn't just knowing what these words mean. It's understanding why a PM actually cares about them.

METRICS & GROWTH

→ North-star metric

→ DAU / MAU

→ Retention

→ Funnel / conversion

→ Activation

→ Cohort

→ A/B test

→ Guardrail metric

→ Product-market fit

→ Growth loop

Each comes with the practical context behind the term, not just a definition.

AI-ERA TERMS

→ LLM

→ Prompt

→ RAG

→ Eval

→ Latency

→ Hallucination

Especially useful if you're applying to AI Product roles, where these terms increasingly come up in product discussions.

One of my favourite sections

Words that make you sound junior vs senior

The difference isn't knowing more buzzwords.

It's moving from:

"We should add this feature."

to asking:

"What problem does this solve, for whom, and what would we give up?"

The vocabulary is easy.

The reflex to ask why and name the trade-off is the real signal.

Why I made this

I'm Ashutosh, an IIT Guwahati student and Product Manager.

When I was getting into Product, I kept running into terminology that everyone seemed to know already.

Eventually I realised that most of these words aren't complicated.

The problem is that they're usually explained in unnecessarily complicated language.

So I made this as the resource I would have wanted:

short definitions, plain English, why it matters, and examples when useful.

This isn't a vocabulary test.

It's a quick reference you can come back to before an interview, assignment, project or Product conversation.

This is for you if:

→ You're completely new to Product

→ You're preparing for your first PM interview

→ You keep hearing PM terminology you don't fully understand

→ You're moving from a technical background into Product

→ You're applying to AI Product roles

→ You want a quick reference instead of a giant glossary

Use a word only when you're comfortable being questioned on it.