“HiPPO stands for ‘Highest Paid Person’s Opinion.'” In American business, the term is used for the opinion of the most senior person in the room, when it decides a question that data should decide.
Ronny Kohavi wrote that “Dylan Lewis at Intuit came up with the acronym HiPO back in 2006.” The analytics writer Avinash Kaushik heard it and blogged about it in October 2006. Kohavi’s team at Microsoft added the second P and the image of a hippopotamus.