Product and AI Terms Explained
Plain language definitions for every term founders and builders need. Each entry includes answer capsules, comparisons, examples, and FAQs optimized for quick understanding.
Product & MVP Terms
The core vocabulary of building, validating, and shipping software products. From lean startup principles to technical debt, these are the terms every founder needs to own before writing a single line of code.
What Is an MVP?
A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is the simplest version of a product that delivers enough value for r…
MVP vs PoC
An MVP (Minimum Viable Product) is a real, working product shipped to actual users to validate marke…
MVP vs Prototype
A prototype simulates a product to test design and concept — it does not actually work end to end. A…
MVP vs MMP
An MVP (Minimum Viable Product) is built to learn — it is the smallest thing you can ship to validat…
What Is Product Market Fit?
Product-market fit is the point where your product satisfies a strong market demand — users actively…
What Is Lean Startup?
The Lean Startup is a methodology for building new products and companies under conditions of extrem…
What Is Vibe Coding?
Vibe coding is a style of software development where a person describes what they want in natural la…
What Is a Discovery Sprint?
A discovery sprint is a structured, time-boxed research and design process — typically 3 to 5 days —…
What Is Technical Debt?
Technical debt is the accumulated cost of shortcuts, quick fixes, and deferred decisions made during…
What Is a SaaS Product?
A SaaS product is software delivered over the internet and accessed via a browser or API, rather tha…
What Is a POC?
A proof of concept (POC) is a small, focused experiment built to verify that a specific technical or…
AI & LLM Terms
The language of modern AI products. Whether you are evaluating a RAG pipeline, picking a model, or explaining fine-tuning to a non-technical co-founder, these definitions give you the vocabulary to move fast and sound credible.
What Is an AI Agent?
An AI agent is a software system that uses a language model to reason, plan, and take actions autono…
What Is Agentic AI?
Agentic AI refers to AI systems designed to pursue goals autonomously over extended sequences of act…
What Is MCP Protocol?
MCP, or Model Context Protocol, is an open standard created by Anthropic that defines how AI models …
What Is Tool Use AI?
Tool use in AI refers to a language model's ability to call external functions, APIs, and services d…
What Is a Chatbot?
A chatbot is a software program designed to simulate conversation with a human user. Modern chatbots…
What Is RAG?
RAG stands for Retrieval Augmented Generation. It is a technique that improves language model respon…
What Is Fine Tuning?
Fine tuning is the process of taking a pretrained large language model and continuing to train it on…
What Is a Vector Database?
A vector database stores data as numerical embeddings rather than rows and columns. It lets you sear…
What Is Prompt Engineering?
Prompt engineering is the practice of designing and refining the inputs you give a language model to…
What Is an LLM?
A large language model (LLM) is a type of AI trained on massive amounts of text to predict and gener…
Development & Tools Terms
The integration and automation vocabulary that separates founders who can talk to engineers from those who cannot. APIs, automation, and internal tools explained without the jargon.
What Is AI Integration?
AI integration is the process of embedding artificial intelligence capabilities into existing softwa…
What Is API Integration?
API integration is the process of connecting two or more software systems so they can share data and…
What Is Workflow Automation?
Workflow automation uses software to execute a sequence of tasks automatically when specific conditi…
What Are Internal Tools?
Internal tools are custom software applications built for use inside a company rather than for exter…
Explore our free tools to put these concepts into practice, or read our engineering blog for in-depth guides on building AI-native products.
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