A cross-functional team is a group of people from different disciplines who work together toward a shared outcome, combining expertise such as product, design, engineering, research, data, marketing, or operations.
Design handoff is the process of transferring design intent, assets, specifications, states, behaviors, and product context from design into engineering implementation.
User retention is the degree to which users continue returning to and receiving value from a product over time after their initial use or activation.
Product activation is the point or set of early behaviors where a new user first experiences meaningful product value and becomes more likely to continue using the product.
A product funnel is a sequence of measurable user steps toward a meaningful product outcome, used to identify where users progress, drop off, or fail to complete a journey.
Product analytics is the collection and analysis of behavioral data from a digital product to understand how people use it, where they succeed or struggle, and how product changes affect outcomes.
Multimodal AI is artificial intelligence that can process, connect, or generate information across more than one modality, such as text, images, audio, video, code, or interface structure.
Product context is the set of information needed to understand how a specific product works, including its users, flows, screens, terminology, design system, rules, data, decisions, and technical constraints.
Context engineering is the practice of selecting, structuring, retrieving, and delivering the information, memory, tools, constraints, and examples an AI system needs to perform a task well.
An AI prompt is the input given to an AI model that communicates the task, context, constraints, examples, desired output, or other instructions used to shape the model’s response.
AI prototyping is the use of AI systems to generate, expand, or modify interactive product prototypes from prompts, product context, existing interfaces, or design-system rules.
AI product design is the use of AI systems to support product-design work such as research synthesis, flow mapping, ideation, state coverage, prototyping, critique, and design-system application.
An AI agent is a software system that uses an AI model to interpret a goal, plan or choose actions, use tools or data, observe results, and continue working toward an outcome.
Generative AI is artificial intelligence that produces new content such as text, images, audio, video, code, or interface structures in response to input and context.
Auto Layout is Figma’s layout system for automatically arranging and resizing frames and components based on content, spacing, padding, alignment, and sizing rules.
Responsive design is an approach where an interface adapts its layout, content, and interaction behavior to different screen sizes, devices, and available space.
A UI pattern is a reusable solution to a recurring interface or interaction problem, such as navigation, search, filtering, confirmation, or error recovery.
A design token is a named, reusable value that stores a design decision such as color, spacing, typography, radius, or motion so it can be applied consistently across platforms.
A component variant is a predefined alternative of a reusable component used to represent controlled differences in purpose, size, state, content, or behavior.
A component library is a maintained collection of reusable interface components that product teams use to build consistent screens and interactions.
A component is a reusable user-interface building block with defined structure, styling, behavior, and states that can be used consistently across a product.
A design system is a shared set of reusable components, design tokens, patterns, rules, and documentation that helps teams build consistent product experiences at scale.
A/B testing is an experiment that randomly exposes comparable users to different product or design variants and measures which version performs better on a predefined outcome.
Iteration is the repeated cycle of making a product or design, learning from evidence, and improving it through successive versions rather than treating the first solution as final.
A high-fidelity prototype is a realistic simulation of a product experience with detailed visual design, representative content, and enough interaction behavior to closely resemble the intended product.
A low-fidelity prototype is a rough, simplified representation of a product experience used to explore structure, flow, and core interactions without detailed visual polish.
A mockup is a static visual representation of a product or screen that shows how the interface is expected to look without necessarily simulating its interactions.
A wireframe is a simplified representation of a screen or interface that focuses on structure, content hierarchy, layout, and functionality before detailed visual styling.
Prototyping is the iterative process of creating representations of a product experience to explore ideas, test assumptions, and improve a solution before or during implementation.
A prototype is a representation of a proposed product experience built to explore, communicate, or test how an idea might work before full implementation.
A research insight is a synthesized understanding of user behavior, motivation, or friction that explains why an observed pattern matters and what it implies for a product decision.
Jobs to be Done is a framework for understanding the progress people are trying to make in a specific situation and why they choose or replace products to help make that progress.
A problem statement is a concise description of the user problem, affected audience, context, and impact that a product team intends to understand or solve.
A pain point is a recurring difficulty, frustration, cost, risk, or obstacle that makes it harder for a user or customer to achieve a goal.
A user need is a problem, goal, motivation, constraint, or desired progress that matters to a person and can guide a product decision.
Usability testing is a research method where representative participants attempt realistic tasks while a team observes whether the product supports those tasks effectively and where friction occurs.
A user interview is a research conversation used to understand a participant’s goals, behavior, context, experiences, needs, and reasoning in their own words.
User research is the systematic study of users, their behavior, goals, needs, context, and experiences to inform product and design decisions.
A decision point is a moment in a flow where different conditions, choices, or system rules cause the path to branch into different next steps.
An error state is the interface condition shown when a task, request, or system operation cannot complete as intended and the user needs explanation or recovery guidance.
A loading state is the temporary product state shown while the system is fetching, processing, generating, uploading, or otherwise preparing a result.
An empty state is the product state shown when a screen, section, or component has no data or content to display yet.
A product state is a condition the product, screen, component, or data can be in at a particular moment, which determines what the user sees and can do.
An edge case is a less-common but plausible condition that pushes a product outside its normal expected behavior and requires an intentional response.
A happy path is the expected sequence where the user provides valid input, the system behaves normally, and the task completes successfully without interruption or error.
A customer journey is the end-to-end relationship a customer has with a company across discovery, evaluation, purchase, product use, support, renewal, and other touchpoints.
A user journey is a representation of the broader experience a person has while trying to achieve a goal, including stages, touchpoints, context, actions, and perceptions over time.
A workflow is a sequence of activities, decisions, handoffs, and system actions used to move work from an initial trigger to a completed outcome.
A task flow is a focused sequence of steps a user follows to complete one specific task, usually without mapping all alternate entry points or branches.
A user flow is a visual or written representation of the steps, decisions, and states a user moves through to accomplish a goal in a product.
A UX audit is a structured evaluation of an existing product experience used to identify usability problems, inconsistencies, risks, and opportunities for improvement.
Cognitive load is the amount of mental effort required to understand information, make decisions, remember context, and complete a task.
Visual hierarchy is the arrangement of interface elements so differences in importance, grouping, and sequence are easy to perceive at a glance.
Information architecture is the practice of organizing, labeling, and structuring content and functionality so people can understand where things are and how to find them.
Accessibility is the practice of designing products so people with different abilities can perceive, understand, navigate, and operate them.
Usability is the degree to which intended users can achieve specified goals effectively, efficiently, and satisfactorily in a particular context.
Interaction design is the practice of defining how a product behaves over time in response to user actions, including feedback, state changes, transitions, constraints, and recovery.
A user interface is the visible and interactive surface through which a person gives commands to a product and receives information or feedback from it.
User experience is the overall experience a person has while using a product, shaped by usefulness, clarity, effort, trust, performance, accessibility, and how well the product handles success and failure.
UI design, or user interface design, is the practice of designing the visual and interactive layer of a digital product, including layout, typography, color, components, hierarchy, and interface states.
UX design, or user experience design, is the practice of designing how people experience a product so they can understand it, complete their goals, recover from problems, and get value with as little unnecessary friction as possible.
Product design is the discipline of shaping how a product solves user problems, from flows and interaction logic to interface behavior, visual design, states, and validation.
Product-market fit is the condition where a product solves an important problem well enough for a defined market that customers repeatedly choose, use, pay for, retain, or recommend it.
A product outcome is a measurable change in user behavior, customer value, or business performance that product work is intended to create, rather than the work that was shipped.
Product prioritization is the process of deciding which product problems, opportunities, and initiatives deserve attention first based on strategy, evidence, impact, effort, risk, and constraints.
A Minimum Viable Product, or MVP, is the smallest useful version of a solution that can test an important product assumption with real users and generate meaningful learning.
Acceptance criteria are the specific, testable conditions a feature or user story must satisfy before the team can consider that behavior correct.
A user story is a short description of something a user wants to accomplish and why it matters to them, written from the user’s point of view.
A Product Requirements Document, or PRD, explains what problem a product or feature should solve, who it is for, what behavior is required, what is in scope, and how success will be judged.
A product roadmap is a shared view of where a product is going, which outcomes or initiatives matter next, and how those priorities connect to product strategy.
Product discovery is the work of understanding a product problem, investigating user needs, testing assumptions, and learning enough to decide whether and what to build.
A product vision describes the future a product is trying to create and why that future matters, giving teams long-term direction without prescribing every feature.
Product strategy is the set of choices that explains which users and problems a product will focus on, what outcomes it wants to create, and how it plans to win.
A product manager is the person responsible for helping a team decide which product problems deserve attention, what outcomes to pursue, and how product decisions connect to the broader strategy.
Product management is the work of deciding which problems a product should solve, why they matter, what should be built next, and how the team will know if it worked.
