That’s Mike’s project. She owns the redesign. He built that. Her numbers. American workplace speech attaches work to a named person as a matter of routine, in praise and in criticism alike. The attribution is automatic, and it runs both ways.
Minimum Viable Product
Build the smallest thing that can be put in front of a real user, ship it, and learn from what happens. The word viable is doing the work. Not good, not finished — just alive enough to generate information.
At-will
The default American employment relationship can be ended by either side at any time, for any lawful reason, without notice. There is no equivalent of a statutory notice period accruing with service. Availability is not protected by anything.
The sandwich
American management training teaches delivering criticism between two pieces of praise, and the technique is common enough to be mocked by its own recipients. The structure exists to cushion the middle. What is being cushioned is not the information — it is the person receiving it.
Move fast and break things
Facebook’s internal motto for its first decade. Not move fast and be careful. The breaking is named, accepted, and put in the sentence. It was retired in 2014, which is itself part of the story — the company iterated on its own motto.
Employee of the month
An American workplace institution with a photograph on the wall, a parking space, a plaque and a public announcement. Nothing about it is private. The recognition is designed to be seen by everyone who was not chosen.
The status column
American project tools display the state of every commitment as a field — green, amber, red, or on track, at risk, blocked — updated by the owner and visible to everyone. The design assumes the status changes. A system built for agreements that hold at the level they were set would not need the column at all.
Fail fast
Two words, and the logic is compressed into them. Failure is assumed. The only variable worth managing is how quickly it arrives, because a slow failure costs more than a fast one to reach the same information.
Just checking in
Just circling back. Following up on this. Any update? Bumping this to the top of your inbox. Did you get a chance to look at this?
Five standard American formulations for asking whether an agreement is still an agreement, and every one of them apologises in the asking.
They are sent routinely, received without offence, and answered. Nobody treats the question as doubt about the person, because everybody is sending them.
The Agile Manifesto
From 11 to 13 February 2001, seventeen software practitioners met at a ski lodge at Snowbird, Utah, and in three days wrote sixty-eight words. The fourth of the four values is the one that matters here: responding to change over following a plan. Not instead of a plan — over it. The plan is acknowledged as valuable and then explicitly ranked second to the ability to change course.