We've all heard them. Maybe you're a product manager and rely on them daily — why wouldn’t you? They mean nothing and everything at the same time.

I’m talking, of course, about buzzwords. Once the domain of high-priced consultants and MBA-packed conference rooms, they’ve steadily infiltrated everyday developer life. But what’s the harm in a little corporate jargon? Besides making you sound definitively uncool, buzzwords create the illusion of progress while letting people sidestep real problem-solving and responsibility.

Without further ado, let’s unpack some common buzzwords, circle back to their core concepts, and double-click on their meaning to gain deeper insights into how we can leverage them for maximum growth.

80/20 Rule

The 80/20 Rule, also known as Pareto's Principle, is a concept that suggests that in many situations, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. First credited to management consultant (surprise, surprise) Joseph Juran in the 1940s, it eventually made its way into the tech industry. Microsoft famously applied it to bug fixes, focusing on just 20% of reported issues for Microsoft Office and Windows, which led to an estimated 80% drop in user error reports.

Despite its well-intentioned origins, the 80/20 rule has become a convenient excuse for executives and product managers unwilling or unable to fully allocate resources — yet still expecting results. It’s not a universal principle, and it doesn't give carte blanche to slash every estimate to 20% of its original scope while assuming you can still capture 80% of the value. It can help engineers prioritize, but its effectiveness is highly contextual. Let me 80/20 this whole section: sometimes the 80/20 rule is bullshit.

We’re Building the Plane on the Runway

This idiom is beloved in tech circles. Its origins are unclear, but the first reference I could find was a 2000 Super Bowl commercial for Electronic Data Systems (EDS), a now-defunct consulting firm and systems integrator. Since then, it’s been adopted into the lexicon of Silicon Valley and tech firms. At its core, it basically means, "Our business is moving so fast and we need to deliver urgent customer impact, so we don’t have time to wait for long development cycles because we’re actively losing a lot of money."

Here’s the problem with it: Some organizations use this as a form of fatalism, staying in this state for multiple years. I’ll grant that sometimes things need to be done on the fly, and there’s no time to wait for long development projects to be complete before meeting a customer’s need. That’s just showbiz, baby. But if you’ve got problems that are 3 years old and you’re still chalking them up to this airplane analogy, then your problems aren’t because of the rapid pace of your business — they’re because you suck at planning.

Tiger Team

Despite its ultra-lame corporate use today, the term tiger team actually has an interesting etymology. Originally U.S. military slang for a small group tasked with real-life penetration testing, the phrase gained popularity during NASA’s heyday in the 1960s — particularly the tiger team assembled to solve the Apollo 13 crisis.

Broadly speaking, a tiger team is a small group of experts brought together to tackle a critical problem. It evokes imagery of elite military operators or rocket scientists working under extreme pressure in the golden age of space travel. But let’s be honest — that ain’t what’s happening for 99.9% of the people using this term today.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with saying "tiger team." The issue is that it makes your semi-interesting work problem sound way more urgent and heroic than it actually is. And more often than not, it means absolutely nothing. That alone earns it a spot in the swear jar. Here’s how it usually plays out: a project manager or senior leadership identifies a problem that matters to them (and maybe a few people in their Slack DMs). They don’t have the time, budget, or resources to handle it through official channels, so they decide: “I know! I’ll throw a tiger team at it.”

Tiger team from where? Which team? Who are these people? Are they just going to materialize out of thin air and solve all your problems? Or are we just rebranding an awkward cross-functional meeting with no authority and a vague deadline?

Conclusion

Buzzwords aren’t inherently evil — they’re just lazy. They make you sound productive without requiring you to be productive. Perhaps worst of all, they make you sound very uncool. And if you think they make you sound cool and professional, that’s kind of like saying, “There’s no weird friend in our group” — which probably means you are the weird friend.

Sure, buzzwords might impress certain audiences on the surface, but they have a way of dumbing down real conversations into the least-fun version of Mad Libs — vague, repetitive, and devoid of actual solutions.

So the next time you’re tempted to throw around the buzzword du jour, take a second and ask yourself: Am I saying something actually useful?