The "Big Word" Tax
Why your vision needs more telemetry
In 1962, John F. Kennedy visited NASA. He noticed a janitor with a broom and asked what he was doing there.
The reply became legend:
“Mr. President, I’m helping put a man on the moon.”
That story is my North Star in my daily job as an Engineering Site Leader at Papaya Global in Poland.
I want every engineer to have that level of clarity. To know exactly how their pull request or bug fix moves the company toward its moonshot.
But certainty doesn’t come from slogans.
It comes from telemetry.
And there’s one thing that quietly destroys it: The Big Word Tax.
The Signal-to-Noise Problem
Recently, I was tasked with leading an All-Hands meeting for our site. Our CEO opened by laying out our high-level mission and strategic pillars. Then, it was my turn to drive.
I’ve sat through enough corporate presentations to know the trap. Leaders often stay in the “fluff layer”—using words like Hyper-growth, Market Dominance, and Strategic Alignment.
But in engineering, a variable without a value is just an error. In leadership, a claim without a metric is just noise. My goal was simple: Total transparency through translation.
Engineering the All-Hands
I brought in our best engineering leaders—directors, EMs, and team leads—to talk about their specific domains. We set a strict rule: take the CEO’s strategic pillars and draw a direct, unbreakable line to:
The projects we are actually shipping.
The goals and numbers we’ve actually achieved.
Out of 30 slides, 24 were nothing but data and facts. We didn’t talk about “better efficiency”; we talked about reducing customer onboarding from months to weeks. We didn’t talk about “growth”; we showed worldwide processed payments scaling every single month.
When we spoke about AI, we didn’t use buzzwords. We showed how AI automations reduced certain ops processes by 60-70%. When we spoke about the future, we pointed to a new portfolio line designed to serve hundreds of thousands of users.
The result? It was cited as one of our best sessions. People didn’t just feel “motivated”—they felt informed. They saw the dashboard.
The “Big Word” Tax: Why Your Vision Has Zero Observability
In engineering, we don’t trust a system we can’t monitor. We build dashboards, we set up OpenTelemetry, and we obsess over p99 latencies because “the app feels fast” isn’t a technical requirement—it’s an opinion.
Yet, when we step into the world of leadership and management, we often abandon this rigor. We trade telemetry for fluff.
When leaders use “Big Words”—Hyper-growth, Market Dominance, Strategic Alignment—without backing them up with hard data, they are essentially asking the team to debug a production outage without access to the logs.
1. Market Dominance is a North Star Metric
“Dominating the market” is a vanity metric. It’s the “Total Page Views” of business talk. It looks good on a slide, but it doesn’t tell the engineers what to build.
The Fluff: “We will be the #1 global solution.”
The Product Metric: “Our North Star is Time to Value (TTV). Currently, it takes a developer 3 months to open our solutions to a new country. Dominance means getting it under 2 weeks. If we hit that, our market share will follow.”
2. The “Growth” Metric: Log the Delta
When management says, “We are moving you to this new team for your professional growth,” it’s often a black-box statement. To an engineer, “growth” without a spec sounds like “we’re refactoring for no reason.”
The Fluff: “This is a high-visibility role with massive growth potential.”
The Telemetry: “You are moving from a project of little business return, no matter the underlying technology. In the new role, you will need to deal with some unstable solutions, but in return, you will work on the frontier of fintech solutions. That is the delta in your skill set.”
3. All-Hands Meetings: The Executive Dashboard
A CEO at an All-Hands is essentially presenting a high-level dashboard. If that dashboard only shows “Up” arrows without scales or units, the engineering team loses trust in the data source.
When leaders show the User Base growth or Revenue Churn on a transparent graph, they are providing the team with the “business telemetry” needed to make autonomous decisions. If I know our churn is high because of system instability, I don’t need a manager to tell me to prioritize bug fixes—the “logs” tell me what to do.
Your Action Plan: Build Your Own Dashboard
Whether you are a Engineerind Director or a Senior IC, your job is to increase the signal-to-noise ratio.
The “So What?” Test: Never share a project update without a “Because...” followed by a number. (e.g., “We are refactoring the KYC service because it handles millions of checks and currently accounts for 40% of our compute costs.”)
Expose the Internal Logic: When moving people between teams, don’t just give the output. Show the business rationale and the areas they’ll grow in.
Demand the Telemetry: If you hear a “Big Word” from above, treat it like a missing log line. Ask: “What specific KPI are we watching to know if this ‘Revolutionary Product’ is actually working?”
In engineering, we don’t ship “fast code”; we ship code with a specific execution time. We don’t ship features without observability → we shouldn’t ship leadership without it either.
Stop selling “vibes.” Start sharing the dashboard.
The Big Word Decoder
(Use responsibly. With a grain of salt.)
When the Leadership says fluff that feels suspicious, run this translator:
1) “Strategic Realignment”
Likely reality:
We discovered our original bet wasn’t working. We are pivoting before finance notices.
Engineering translation:
We hit a local maximum. The gradient pointed somewhere else.
Telemetry to request:
Which KPI declined? What signal forced the pivot? What are the new success metrics?
2) “Hyper-Growth Phase”
Likely reality:
Demand is increasing faster than our systems and onboarding process can handle.
Engineering translation:
Load is spiking. Capacity planning was optimistic.
Telemetry to request:
Hiring velocity vs onboarding capacity? Incident rate trend?
3) “World-Class Platform”
Likely reality:
We want to believe this is defensible.
Engineering translation:
Some competitors have better UX, faster response times, or fewer bugs.
Telemetry to request:
Win/loss analysis? p95 latency vs competitors? Conversion delta?
4) “Efficiency Initiative”
Likely reality:
Margins are tighter than expected.
Engineering translation:
Cloud bill is scary. Payroll ratio needs correction.
Telemetry to request:
Cost per transaction? Compute per customer? Revenue per engineer? (Have a look at Frugal Architect, I love the concept).
5) “Opportunity to Grow”
Likely reality:
This system is fragile and needs an adult.
Engineering translation:
High p99 latency. High incident frequency. Tribal knowledge risk.
Telemetry to request:
Error rates? On-call load? Bus factor?
6) “AI-Driven Transformation”
Likely reality:
We need to show the board progress in the AI landscape.
Engineering translation:
We are experimenting and hoping that at least one use case sticks.
Telemetry to request:
Automation rate? Hours saved? Accuracy delta vs baseline? Cost per inference?
7) “Customer Obsession”
Likely reality:
Churn is creeping up.
Engineering translation:
Time to Value is too long. Activation funnel is leaking.
Telemetry to request:
TTV? Activation rate? Retention at 30/90 days?
8) “Move Fast”
Likely reality:
We’re behind schedule.
Engineering translation:
We are trading test coverage for calendar time.
Telemetry to request:
Deployment frequency? Change failure rate? Lead time trend? (Yes, DORA!)
9) “Focus”
Likely reality:
We started too many initiatives.
Engineering translation:
Concurrency exceeded cognitive bandwidth.
Telemetry to request:
Active initiatives count? WIP per team? Portfolio ROI per stream?
How to Use This Cheat Sheet
This is not about mocking leadership.
It’s about restoring observability.
Every big word hides:
A constraint
A trade-off
A metric
A risk
Your job as an engineering leader is not to reject vision.
It’s to instrument it.