Definition

The person or entity whose money you desperately want, requiring you to pretend their feedback is valuable and their complaints are reasonable. In corporate speak, they're always right, even when they're spectacularly wrong. Modern businesses have rebranded them as "users," "clients," or "guests" to make the transaction feel less transactional.

Example Usage

Our customer requested a feature that violates the laws of physics, so we scheduled a discovery call to explore their vision.

Source: Business terminology via Dictionary definitions

Related Terms

Beginner

Best Practice

Something another company did once that worked and has now become an unquestionable commandment carved in corporate stone. The adult version of "but mom, everyone else is doing it."

💼 Corporate / Business
Intermediate

leveraged

Corporate-speak for "using something to maximum advantage," often involving debt, other people's money, or buzzwords in a PowerPoint. In finance, it means borrowing to amplify returns; in business meetings, it means someone watched too many TED Talks.

💼 Corporate / Business
Intermediate

Scalable

Something that can grow without breaking, a quality attributed to every startup pitch and approximately zero of their actual products. If you hear "it's scalable" often enough, you start to realize it's the business equivalent of "trust me, bro."

💼 Corporate / Business
Intermediate

convene

The formal way of saying "let's all get together for a meeting," typically used when someone wants to sound official about assembling a group. It's what happens when calling everyone into a conference room needs gravitas, usually for government bodies, boards, or people who love Robert's Rules of Order. Basically, it's corporate speak for "everyone get in here."

💼 Corporate / Business
Advanced

Paradigm Shift

A fancy way of saying things are changing, deployed to make mundane policy updates sound like civilization-altering events. Updating the break room coffee machine has been called a paradigm shift at least once in every Fortune 500 company.

💼 Corporate / Business
Advanced

bike-shedding

Wasting time on trivial details while ignoring complex, important issues. Named after spending hours debating bike shed color instead of nuclear reactor design.

💼 Corporate / Business

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Snatched

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