Main idea

"Customer" can mean the end user, the buyer, the prescriber, the strategic account or the priority segment. "Quality" can mean technical robustness, premium perception, absence of defects, functional richness or ease of use. "Launch" can mean a production release, a public announcement, a commercial opening or genuine availability to the market. Two teams using these words without defining them believe they are discussing the same subject, and are in fact working on two subjects.

What a gap in definitions reveals is almost never a communication problem. Discovering that marketing calls the announcement a "launch" and product calls genuine availability a "launch" is discovering that the two functions are not aiming at the same date, therefore not at the same scope, therefore not at the same promise. The disagreement was whole before the discovery; it was merely illegible.

The consequence is economic. The same disagreement is paid for at two very different rates depending on when it surfaces: a few hours of discussion around a short list of words to stabilize, or an inconsistency observed on launch day, when the press release, the product and the sales pitch no longer say the same thing. That is the only reason to keep a project glossary — and it has nothing to do with tidy vocabulary.

Why it matters

This gives the glossary a use that is not documentary: it is not there to make people speak well, it is there to surface, early, substantive disagreements that nothing else triggers.

It also indicates which words deserve an entry: not the technical or little-known ones, but the ones that carry decisions — customer, target, promise, offer, success, launch, activation, quality, priority.

Nuances and limits

Not every gap in definitions hides a disagreement: some are simple jargon variants between trades, and stabilizing them reveals nothing.

And earliness is not always an advantage: on a product whose target has not been chosen yet, freezing the meaning of "customer" too soon manufactures agreement on a word instead of exposing the choice that remains to be made.

Open questions

• How do you spot, in a project's everyday vocabulary, the words whose ambiguity carries a decision rather than a shade of trade meaning?