Strategy Jargon: Business Buzzwords and What They Actually Mean

Strategy jargon is the language senior people use to make decisions sound inevitable. Most of it is borrowed from consulting, finance, or startup culture, and its main function is to make a choice (any choice) sound more considered than it actually was. If you've ever been in a meeting where someone said "let's pivot" and the room nodded, you already know the power of this vocabulary.

Here's the field guide.

🎯 Direction phrases

"Pivot." Our original plan isn't working and we're doing something different now. "Pivot" sounds decisive and founder-coded. "Abandoning the plan" sounds like failure. The two mean the same thing.

"Paradigm shift." A change big enough that I want to sound like a Harvard Business Review subscriber describing it. Almost always used to oversell a small change.

"Paradigm" alone. A word used exclusively by people who have just read a management book and are trying it out in conversation. No executive has ever said "paradigm" without sounding slightly performative.

"Move the needle." Produce a measurable result. The phrase implies the company has a needle, when in reality the company has a dashboard nobody looks at. Senior leaders love this phrase because it sounds tactile.

"North star." The metric we will not actually use to make decisions, but will put in every strategy deck to make our quarterly goals sound aspirational.

🍎 Effort phrases

"Low-hanging fruit." Easy wins we haven't bothered to do yet, which the speaker is now offering up as a valuable insight. If it was genuinely easy AND valuable, it would already be done.

"Boil the ocean." Taking on too much at once. Usually deployed by the person who proposed taking on too much at once, and who is now describing a smaller subset of it as "not boiling the ocean."

"Reinvent the wheel." Building something that already exists. Usually said to shut down someone who has suggested improving a bad existing process. "Let's not reinvent the wheel" translates as "let's keep using the broken thing we already have."

"MVP." Minimum Viable Product. In practice, the word "minimum" is doing no work. MVPs are always bigger than they needed to be. The M is aspirational.

"Quick win." Something a senior leader would like to announce in the next all-hands meeting. "Quick" usually means "can be delivered in one quarter" (it can't).

💰 Scale phrases

"Scale" (as a verb). Make bigger without falling apart. Used as a universal positive: "does this scale?" is the MBA version of "is this good?"

"10x." An impossible target set by someone who does not have to hit it personally. Also the adjective form: a "10x engineer," a "10x growth plan." The number is never literal.

"Disrupt." Enter an industry and upset the incumbents. Originally a real concept in Clayton Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma; now used to describe any startup doing anything at all. If it's a B2C app, it's "disrupting" something.

"Moat." Something that makes your business hard to copy. The word is always used with more confidence than the moat actually deserves. Most companies claiming moats have a small puddle.

"Green field" / "Blue sky." Thinking about a problem without existing constraints. In practice, this phrase shows up 10 minutes before the constraints are re-introduced. "Let's blue sky this" usually ends with "but realistically we only have 3 engineers."

How to translate a strategy meeting

If someone in a meeting says any of these phrases, translate them as follows:

• "We need to pivot" → "I don't know what to do next"
• "That's a paradigm shift" → "I just had my first new idea this quarter"
• "Let's move the needle" → "Do something. I don't know what. Just do something"
• "That's low-hanging fruit" → "Why haven't you done this yet"
• "Let's not boil the ocean" → "Make the plan smaller so I can approve it"
• "This will 10x the business" → "Approve my budget"

And when someone in the strategy meeting says something that makes you want to scream, that's what Keparat is for.