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Kurums Decoded: business and corporate terms explained for Gen Z in plain, pop-culture English. Corporate, translated.
An SLA, or service level agreement, is a written commitment between a provider and a customer that defines how a service will perform, using measurable targets like uptime, response time or delivery time. It also spells out how performance is measured and what the customer gets, often a credit or refund, when the provider misses the target.
Severance is pay and sometimes other benefits an employer gives a worker when their job ends, usually because of layoffs, restructuring or termination without serious misconduct. Depending on the country, it may be required by law, set by a contract or offered voluntarily, and it often comes with an agreement the employee is asked to sign.
Scalability is the ability of a system, product or business to handle more work, more users or more customers without breaking, slowing to a crawl or needing costs to grow just as fast. A scalable setup can grow by adding resources in a planned way instead of being rebuilt from scratch.
Lean is a management approach that focuses on delivering what the customer values while removing waste: anything that takes time, money or effort without adding value. It grew out of the Toyota Production System in Japan and is now used in factories, hospitals, offices and software teams to improve processes step by step.
MRR, or monthly recurring revenue, is the predictable income a business expects to earn every month from active subscriptions or contracts. ARR, or annual recurring revenue, is the same idea on a yearly scale, often calculated as MRR times twelve. Both leave out one-time fees, setup charges and other revenue that will not repeat.
Cloud vs on-prem is the choice between running software and data on servers rented from a provider over the internet (cloud) or on hardware a company owns and operates in its own building or data center (on-premises). The decision shapes cost, control, security responsibilities, speed of setup and who fixes things when they break.
SaaS, short for software as a service, is software you use over the internet and pay for on a subscription, usually per user per month or per year. The provider runs the servers, handles updates, security and backups, and you simply log in through a browser or app instead of installing and maintaining it yourself.
A bottleneck is the step in a process with the least capacity, the point where work piles up and waits. Because everything has to pass through it, the bottleneck sets the speed of the whole system. Improving any other step barely helps until the bottleneck itself is fixed.
Vesting means you earn your shares or stock options gradually over a set period instead of getting them all on day one. A cliff is a waiting period at the start, often one year, before anything vests at all. A common setup is four years of vesting with a one-year cliff, then monthly vesting after that.
An MVP, short for minimum viable product, is the smallest version of a product that real users can actually use, built to test whether an idea is worth pursuing. It includes only the core features needed to solve one problem, so a team can launch quickly, collect feedback and decide what to build next.
An OKR, short for objectives and key results, is a goal-setting method that pairs one clear, ambitious objective with a few measurable key results showing whether it was achieved. Teams usually set OKRs every quarter, share them openly, and score them at the end to learn what worked.
Tech debt, short for technical debt, is the future cost of choosing a quick or limited solution in software instead of a better one that would take longer. Like financial debt, it can be useful in the short term, but it builds interest: every later change becomes slower, riskier and more expensive until someone pays it down.