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Product Management vocabulary · Prioritization

Trade-off

Meaning in product management, with examples

/ˈtreɪdɔːf/nounCore term

In product management, trade-off means: A situation in which getting more of one thing means accepting less of another, such as releasing faster but with fewer features.

In Turkish: ödünleşim, denge kurma, tercih

How it is used

Product work is full of trade-offs between speed, quality, scope and cost. PMs make trade-offs and explain them openly to stakeholders. Also written tradeoff, especially in American tech writing.

Example sentences

  1. The trade-off is clear: we can launch in May without the reports, or in July with them.

  2. Every roadmap decision is a trade-off, so let's write down what we're giving up.

Common collocations

  • make a trade-off
  • explain the trade-offs
  • difficult trade-off
  • weigh the trade-offs
  • prioritizeTo decide which work is most important and should be done first, and therefore which work will wait or will not be done at all.
  • scope creepThe slow, uncontrolled growth of a feature or project as extra requirements are added after work has started, usually without changing the deadline.
  • technical debtThe future cost of shortcuts taken in code or design to deliver faster, which makes later changes slower and riskier until the team fixes them.
  • MVPShort for minimum viable product: the simplest version of a product that can be released to real users to learn whether the idea is worth building further.
  • quick winAn improvement that is cheap and fast to deliver but still brings clear value, so it is worth doing soon.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Prioritization

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