The most important document I ever wrote was not a Strategy doc, Product Requirements Doc (PRD), a will, a contract, or one of the many other important docs people write in life. It was a glossary.
Specifically, it was a simple dictionary of my team's slang/brain-rot terms and inside jokes, which I started writing down because one engineer kept getting left out of the joke and I decided that was a bug, not a fact of life.
The team behind the glossary, according to our very official org chart
At the time, I was a founding Product Manager at an early-stage compute startup full of young software engineers in their early 20s. Though I was in my late 20s at the time, that had no impact on my tendency to talk in deeply unserious terms with my devs (software developers). These words spilled into customer meetings, lunches, Slack threads, and late-night debugging sessions.
For example:
- If you "ate and left no crumbs," you did exceptional work
- If you merely "ate," it was good, but you left some crumbs
- "Tea" is news, drama, or anything remotely of interest
- "GDC" is God Damn Compute
- If someone's "face card never declines," they are so good-looking they could pay with their own face and it would never run out of credit or that they have an unlimited budget
- "Shrimping" is leaning over your desk with such bad posture that you resemble a shrimp, usually at 7pm on a Wednesday
- "Slay" is a verb, a compliment, and occasionally a code review.
There was also a whole subsection on what it means to act like specific people on the team, which I will not be reproducing here, for their safety and mine.
None of this was in the (not super existent) onboarding doc but all of it is load-bearing for actually belonging.
The engineer I mentioned earlier was brilliant, lovable, and incredible at his job. English was not his first language, which was irrelevant to his code and performance and never got in the way one-on-one. But he would sometimes go quiet in the parts of Slack and in person events where the team was just being a team, because half of the conversation was not in any dictionary that exists in any language. And the thing about being new, or being the person the jokes were not written for is unfortunately that you can do the work perfectly and still feel like you are standing outside the window looking in.
So I started to write it down. I made a simple table in a google doc and gave every term a plain definition. People kept adding to it until it was equal parts reference and running bit, which in my opinion is the highest form a document can ascend to.
He started learning the terms and saying them back. He started landing the jokes (often better than I ever could have). Somewhere in there he stopped standing outside the window and entered the room.
Around the same time, in another channel, a much more responsible version of the same instinct kicked off: a sincere effort to capture our internal acronyms for onboarding. Alphabet soup. A tidy Confluence page. The grown-up document. Both documents exist because there is a language when you join a company and new people do not usually do not know it. Only one of these documents defines "pookie devs." I will let you guess which one people actually quote in the wild, and I will note that I have a receipt of a coworker writing "checks infra team glossary... slay" in earnest, which is not a thing that has ever happened to a grown up Confluence page.
I have written many documents that mattered more on paper. PRDs that unblocked deploys, specs a dozen engineers built against, a change order state machine. This one mattered more in the way that actually counts, because feature ships value this shipped belonging.
Onboarding is not just access, permissions, a list of acronyms, and a handbook. It is being let in to a team and becoming a part of that community. It is feeling like you are in on the bit when a team is just acting like themselves.
I think about this more now, because I just started an intimidating new job where I am the new person who does not know all of the acronyms and words yet. I feel myself go quiet in Slack sometimes because I do not yet know which acronym is load-bearing and which one is a bit.
Thankfully, my team has already written the grownup version of this document so the gap doesn't feel quite so scary. The teams worth being on are the ones where someone makes the effort to lower the wall. Maybe eventually I will recreate the less-grown-up glossary here too, if I start confusing brilliant engineers and researchers.
The engineer told me later it was the thing that made him feel like he belonged there. The most important document I ever wrote, and it has an entry for "ate and left no crumbs."
Open tabs
- Culture is the set of jokes you have to be in the room to get. You cannot fully document your way into it, but you can lower the wall, and lowering the wall is most of the job.
- Pocket. A handheld recorder that turns meetings into transcripts, summaries, and action items automatically, then lets you ask it questions about what was said later. The kind of tool that makes staying present in a room easier.
- The question I keep sitting with isn't what AI takes away. It's what you'd do with four extra hours a day if you got to spend them being human instead of in front of a laptop or doing mundane work. I think most of us have forgotten what we'd fill it with, and that's the more interesting problem. That's the part of this I want to build toward.
References: the Infra Team glossary in the wild
- Dec 5, 2025 The glossary is born. A coworker posts "need budget for this shirt," and then the doc drops: "team glossary can update as needed."
- Dec 16, 2025 Living-doc energy. "not in the glossary i wouldn't know," in a thread that also features a coworker learning to use "gagged" and asking "did i use that properly."
- Feb 4, 2026 "Should I share the Infra Team Glossary?" My response, for the record: "please god no."
- Feb 9, 2026 Treated as canon in a thread: "king of office fits and... checks infra team glossary... 'slay'."
- Many more such examples, some of which I am too afraid to rehash