Speaking in Tech

A creative director's phrasebook for the other side of the building — where everything sounds alien but works exactly the same way

Before we begin: how this list was born

Two-three months ago, I walked into my first product management class and heard a sentence that almost made me leave.

“We need to validate PMF before defining our GTM and aligning OKRs with the North Star Metric.” Something like this. Or even worth,

Seventeen+ years in advertising. Ogilvy. Leo Burnett. A co-founded creative academy. Hundreds of campaigns, brand systems, creative workshops. And in that moment, I felt like a tourist who’d been airdropped into a country where everyone speaks in code — confident, fast, acronym-heavy code — and nobody hands you a dictionary at the border.

So I made one for myself.

Not a textbook glossary. More like a translation layer — a document I kept updating every time I sat in a meeting and thought: wait, I know this concept. I’ve been doing this for fifteen years. They just call it something else.

That document became this piece.

Because here’s what I discovered, term by term, meeting by meeting: the tech world and the creative world aren’t two different planets. They’re the same city with two dialects. The product people talk about “activation” — we call it the aha moment. They obsess over “retention” — we built careers on brand loyalty. They worship “positioning” — we literally wrote the positioning statements they’re trying to reverse-engineer from a feature list.

The gap isn’t knowledge. It’s vocabulary.

This is for anyone making the same crossing I did — or thinking about it. Creative directors curious about product. Brand strategists eyeing startups. Designers who keep hearing “sprint” and aren’t sure if anyone’s actually running. You don’t need to become a product manager. You need to realize you’ve been one all along — just without the job title and the Jira board.

Let’s translate.

I. The brief is the same. The name tag isn’t.

You know that moment in a brand strategy project when everything clicks? The audience research lands, the insight is sharp, the positioning feels inevitable, and the client looks at the creative concept and says: “This is exactly what we needed but couldn’t articulate.”

In tech, that moment has a name: Product-Market Fit — or PMF, because the tech world runs on three-letter abbreviations the way agencies run on coffee and passive aggression.

PMF is the moment your product satisfies a real market need so precisely that growth starts pulling instead of pushing. Teams spend months — sometimes years — trying to find it. VCs won’t fund scaling until they see it. It’s the single most discussed concept in startup culture.

And you’ve felt it before. Every time a campaign hit — when the brand insight unlocked a message that made the audience lean in — that was PMF’s creative cousin. Brand-market resonance. Same physics, different lab.

Once you see this pattern, it starts repeating everywhere.

Value Proposition — the thing founders agonize over in pitch decks — is positioning. Literally. It’s the “why us” distilled to one sentence. You’ve written these at agencies, except you called them positioning statements and the client changed them four times before launch.

ICP — Ideal Customer Profile — is the target audience persona, “a brand’s muse”, but sharpened to a surgical point. Not “women 25–45 interested in wellness.” More like “Head of Marketing at a Series B fintech in DACH, 3–5 years in role, reports to a CFO who doesn’t believe in brand.” In agencies, you’d call this a brief’s audience section done properly. In tech, it determines where every sales dollar goes.

North Star Metric is the one number that tells you whether your product actually matters to people. Think of it as the KPI that sits above all other KPIs — the single signal that captures whether you’re delivering real value. In brand terms, it’s the metric you’d tattoo on the CMO’s forearm if they’d let you. Not impressions. Not reach. The thing that proves the work is working.

And Positioning — yes, it exists in tech as its own term, separate from brand strategy — means exactly what you think it means. How your product occupies a distinct place in the customer’s mind relative to alternatives. Identical concept. But here’s the gap: most founders confuse positioning with features. “We’re like Slack but with AI.” That’s not positioning. That’s a feature comparison wearing positioning’s coat. Your job, if you cross over, is to translate features into meaning. You’ve been doing this your whole career. They just didn’t know they needed you yet.

II. The funnel you already know (they just gave it a pirate flag)

Here’s a gift from the growth marketing world: AARRR — also known as Pirate Metrics, because someone at a startup in 2007 realized the acronym sounds like a pirate and the name stuck forever. Welcome to tech naming conventions.

AARRR stands for: Acquisition → Activation → Retention → Revenue → Referral.

Now read this: Awareness → Trial → Loyalty → Revenue → Advocacy.

That’s the brand funnel. Your funnel. The one you’ve been building campaigns around for years. The mapping is almost embarrassingly direct.

Activation — the moment a new user first experiences the core value of the product — is your aha moment by another name. The instant someone goes from “I signed up” to “oh, this is why this exists.” In campaigns, you’ve designed these moments intentionally: the visual that stops the scroll, the headline that reframes the problem, the demo that makes the prospect say “wait, show me that again.” Same craft, different medium.

Retention and Churn are the yin and yang of product health. Retention measures who stays. Churn measures who leaves. Together, they’re the most important growth metrics after PMF — because acquiring users who leave is just expensive theater.

In brand terms? This is loyalty. The difference is precision. Tech measures retention weekly, with cohort analysis and behavioral data. Branding measures it annually, with brand trackers and NPS surveys. Same question — are people coming back? — asked at radically different clock speeds.

CAC and LTV — Customer Acquisition Cost and Lifetime Value — are the unit economics that keep founders awake at 3 AM. If it costs you more to get a customer than that customer will ever pay you, you don’t have a business. You have a bonfire.

You understand this intuitively from agency economics: cost per lead, cost per conversion, ROI on media spend. CAC/LTV is the same math, applied to the entire customer relationship instead of a single campaign. And here’s a line you can use in your first startup meeting: “Brand is what makes your CAC go down and your LTV go up over time. It’s compound interest for trust.” Watch the room recalibrate.

III. The process is identical (they just ship faster)

If you’ve ever run a production cycle at an agency — brief lands Monday, internal review Wednesday, client presentation Friday — you already understand Sprints. A sprint is a fixed work cycle, usually two weeks, with planning at the start, execution in the middle, and a review at the end. Most tech teams run on this rhythm. It’s production scheduling with a standup meeting every morning and a retrospective every two weeks.

Agile is the philosophy underneath: build in short cycles, get feedback early, adapt constantly. If you’ve worked at any agency that wasn’t completely dysfunctional, you’ve practiced this. You just didn’t have a manifesto printed on the wall.

MVP — Minimum Viable Product — is concept testing. Not the final campaign. Not the polished brand book. The scrappiest version of the idea that lets you put it in front of real people and learn whether it works before you spend six months and half a million producing the full thing. You’ve done this every time you tested a creative concept with a focus group or ran an A/B test on ad copy. MVP energy is: show the sketch, not the oil painting.

Lean Startup formalizes this into a loop: Build → Measure → Learn. Build a small thing. Measure how people react. Learn from the data. Repeat. If this sounds familiar, it’s because agencies have been running a version of it forever: concept → test → feedback → iteration. The startup world just gave it a book deal and a TED talk.

Design Thinking — Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test — maps so directly to the agency process that the first time I saw it on a slide, I thought someone had plagiarized a planning department’s workflow. Consumer research → brief → brainstorm → concept → testing. Identical structure. IDEO and Stanford’s d.school packaged it beautifully, but the bones are the same bones you’ve been building on.

And Pivot — the word that makes founders sound brave and investors nervous — is rebranding triggered by market feedback. You’ve watched brands pivot their positioning when the original one didn’t land. Same logic, higher emotional stakes, because in startups the pivot isn’t just a messaging change — it might mean rebuilding the product. But the mental model is identical: the market told us something, and we’re listening instead of arguing.

IV. The strategy layer (where you’re already fluent)

This is where creative people have the biggest unfair advantage — and don’t know it.

GTM — Go-to-Market — is the strategy for launching a product: who’s the audience, what channels, what messaging, what pricing, what sequence. Read that sentence again. Now tell me it’s not a campaign brief combined with a media plan and a launch strategy. You’ve built GTMs your entire career. You called them launch plans, comms strategies, or “the deck for the client.” The deliverable is the same. The acronym is new.

Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) is the framework that says: people don’t buy products, they hire them to do a job. A person doesn’t buy a drill because they want a drill. They buy a drill because they want a hole in the wall. And they want a hole in the wall because they want to hang a photo. And they want to hang a photo because they want their apartment to feel like home.

Sound familiar? It should. This is consumer insight — the deep, motivational layer underneath the surface behavior. At Ogilvy, you called it “the real reason people buy.” Clayton Christensen gave it a framework and a name. Same excavation, different shovel.

Blue Ocean Strategy — creating uncontested market space instead of fighting in a bloody “red ocean” of competition — is category design meets positioning. Finding the white space for a brand to own. You’ve done this: identified the gap no competitor occupies and built a brand to fill it. In tech, they write entire business plans around this insight. In advertising, you put it on slide 7 of the strategy deck and moved on.

Category Design takes Blue Ocean further: don’t just find an empty space — create a new category and define the rules. This is naming and positioning at the highest level. When a startup says “we’re creating a new category,” what they mean is: we’re going to make people think about a problem differently, and then position ourselves as the only solution to the problem we just defined. If that’s not strategic creative work, nothing is.

Brand Architecture — how a company organizes its brands (branded house, house of brands, endorsed, hybrid) — exists in tech too, and it becomes critical when startups grow, acquire companies, or launch sub-products. The founder who started with one product and one name suddenly has three products and no idea whether to put them under one brand or give them separate identities. You’ve solved this problem before. They haven’t. That’s your leverage.

And the Hook Model (Nir Eyal’s framework: Trigger → Action → Variable Reward → Investment) is behavioral design meets creative direction. You’ve created campaigns that trigger behavior — the ad that makes you want, the packaging that makes you reach, the CTA that makes you click. The Hook Model applies the same psychology to product design: how do you make someone come back without asking them to? You already think this way. You just apply it in 30-second intervals instead of product lifecycles.

V. The growth engine (where brand is the unfair advantage nobody talks about)

Three concepts that run every growth conversation in tech — and where creative people are chronically underestimated.

Flywheel is a self-reinforcing growth loop. Good product → happy users → word of mouth → more users → better data → better product → happier users → more word of mouth. Each rotation accelerates the next. Amazon’s flywheel is legendary. So is Apple’s ecosystem lock-in.

Here’s what most tech teams miss: brand amplifies every stage of the flywheel. It’s the lubricant that makes the loop spin faster. A strong brand means lower acquisition costs (people come to you), higher activation rates (trust is pre-built), better retention (identity, not just utility), and more referrals (people share things they’re proud to be associated with). If you can articulate this in a product meeting, you’ll watch the “brand is a nice-to-have” crowd go very quiet.

PLG — Product-Led Growth — means the product itself drives acquisition. No sales team cold-calling. No paid ads (or fewer of them). The product is so good that people try it, love it, invite colleagues, and upgrade. Slack, Notion, Figma, Calendly — all PLG.

The PLG crowd sometimes believes brand doesn’t matter in their model. They’re wrong. In PLG, the product IS the primary brand touchpoint. Every onboarding screen, every empty state, every error message, every tooltip — that’s brand. UX writing is copywriting. The upgrade prompt is a sales page. The loading screen is a billboard. PLG doesn’t eliminate brand. It makes every pixel of the product a brand decision.

Moat — a sustainable competitive advantage that’s hard to copy. Network effects, proprietary data, switching costs, patents, economies of scale. Warren Buffett coined the business metaphor. Every investor asks about it.

Here’s the line I keep using: brand is a moat. Not the only moat. Not always the deepest moat. But a real one. Brand equity compounds over time, like product quality. It creates switching costs that aren’t contractual but emotional. It makes your CAC lower than competitors’. It makes talent want to work for you. When a founder tells you “we don’t need brand at this stage,” what they’re really saying is “we don’t understand that brand isn’t a stage — it’s a layer.”

VI. The money conversation (where you stop feeling like a tourist)

The last cluster. The one that makes creative people’s eyes glaze over — until you realize it’s the same conversation you’ve been having, just with different units.

MRR / ARR — Monthly and Annual Recurring Revenue — is subscription income. The heartbeat of every SaaS business. If you’ve worked with any subscription-based media company (I spent years at MEGOGO, one of the largest streaming platforms in Eastern Europe), you already know this model. Revenue isn’t a one-time transaction. It’s a relationship measured in months.

Burn Rate and Runway — how fast a startup spends money (burn) and how long until the money runs out (runway). If you’ve co-founded anything, you know this feeling in your bones. It’s the creative budget conversation, but existential. “We have 14 months of runway” means “we have 14 months to prove this works or we’re done.” Concentrates the mind wonderfully.

Series A, B, C — funding rounds, each with different expectations. Seed is the idea stage (you have a thesis, maybe a prototype). Series A means you’ve found PMF and need money to grow. Series B is scaling. Series C is market dominance.

Here’s why this matters for creative people: each stage needs different brand work. A seed-stage startup needs naming, core positioning, maybe a logo that doesn’t embarrass them in a pitch deck. A Series A company needs an identity system that scales. A Series B company needs brand architecture because they’re launching a second product. A Series C company needs a brand that can recruit 200 people in six months and make them all feel like they joined something that matters. If you can map your services to these stages, you stop being “the brand person” and start being “the person who understands what we need right now.”

OKRs — Objectives and Key Results — is the goal-setting framework most tech companies use. An Objective is ambitious and qualitative (”Become the most trusted AI tool for creative teams”). Key Results are measurable (”Reach 10K weekly active users,” “Achieve NPS > 60,” “Reduce onboarding time to under 3 minutes”).

It’s a creative brief. Objective = what we want to achieve. Key Results = how we’ll know it worked. You’ve been writing these your entire career. The format is tighter, the cadence is quarterly, and there’s a scoring system. But the thinking is identical.

The real translation

I could keep going. There are dozens more terms — cohort analysis, feature flags, technical debt, API integrations, A/B testing at scale. But the point of this piece isn’t to be exhaustive. It’s to be liberating.

Because the hardest part of crossing from creative to tech isn’t learning new concepts. It’s the imposter syndrome that comes from hearing familiar ideas in an unfamiliar accent and concluding that you don’t belong in the room.

You belong in the room.

The creative industry trained you in consumer psychology, narrative structure, visual systems, audience segmentation, campaign architecture, and the discipline of generating ideas under pressure with a deadline and a skeptical client. That’s not a background you need to overcome. That’s a background most product teams are missing — and paying consultants to approximate.

The vocabulary gap is real, but it’s narrow. A few weeks of immersion and you’ll stop translating in your head. A few months and you’ll start catching things the native speakers miss — because you see the brand layer they keep forgetting is there.

Learn their language. Don’t abandon yours.

The tech world doesn’t need another product manager. It needs people who can look at a product roadmap and see a story. Who can look at a GTM plan and see a campaign. Who can look at a North Star Metric and ask: “But does anyone feel anything about this?”

That’s not a skill you need to acquire.

That’s the skill you’ve been sharpening for years.

Serhiy Vovk is the founder of VOVK (Creative) Consulting and co-founder of Kyiv Academy of Media Arts (KAMA). He writes about what happens when the creative industry learns to speak machine at aibubbledotcom.com.