Reference

Technology.

A short reminder. Follow a lesson for the decision behind the term.

API

A contract through which software components exchange data or request actions.

Why a PM cares: Its capabilities, ownership, limits, and reliability shape the experience you can promise.

A text format for data built from objects, arrays, and typed values.

Why a PM cares: Reading the shape helps you identify missing data, units, and edge cases in a response.

A representation of entities, their properties, and their relationships.

Why a PM cares: Changes to ownership or relationships can affect permissions, reporting, and migrations.

The process of establishing an identity.

Why a PM cares: A successful login does not by itself grant permission for every action.

A decision about whether an identity may perform an action on a resource.

Why a PM cares: The product needs explicit access rules and understandable denied states.

The time an operation takes to respond or complete under a stated measurement.

Why a PM cares: Users experience waiting directly; use distributions and task context rather than only averages.

A stored result reused to avoid repeating work.

Why a PM cares: Faster responses require deliberate choices about freshness, invalidation, and privacy.

An HTTP notification sent to another system when an event occurs.

Why a PM cares: Delayed, duplicate, or out-of-order delivery affects confirmation and retry behavior.

The ability to investigate system behavior using outputs such as logs, metrics, and traces.

Why a PM cares: It helps the team connect customer reports to failure mechanisms and restore service.

A control that enables or disables behavior for a defined population or context.

Why a PM cares: It separates deployment from exposure, but needs monitoring, recovery, and eventual cleanup.