Words are hard...

Every industry possesses its unique terms, abbreviations, and TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms). Although the words may be identical, their meanings can vary significantly. To facilitate a successful discussion, it is your responsibility as a product manager to grasp your customer's interpretation, rather than expecting them to understand yours.

"Seek first to understand, then to be understood" - Steven R. Covey

I learned this lesson the hard way. We were getting ready to open a new casino in a market that previously had not had these, as they had just passed the law to allow casinos in the state (both the state and the casino company shall remain anonymous). As a result the talent pool that had experience was limited as this was the first of its kind in the area.

The food and beverage department was running in a server/cashier manner, meaning that the servers would start the transactions, add all of the items during the guest's visit to the bill, and then the customer would take that bill to the cashier at the end of visit.

Now, the restaurant term for this is not normally "bill", it is usually called a "check" and this is where the confusion began...

When doing openings of this sort we had our training classes scheduled where the servers would be the first group through, and we would train them how to use the point of sale (POS) first, and generate multiple open transactions, which they would pile up for the next class - the cashiers. Many of the servers hired were very familiar with the common restaurant terms, and that class breezed through its training.

The cashiers were a different story all togehter - many of the cashiers hired had been retail cashiers, hailing from department stores. The retail lexicon is just a few degrees off from the restaurant verbiage.

I started the class, introduced myself, gave the overview of what we were hoping to achieve in the class, made a bad dad joke to put everyone at ease, and began the training I had done at multiple casino openings in the Vegas and Atlantic City area (we were not in either of those cities).

"Ok, we're going to sign into your terminal and we're going to pick up the check on the top of your pile."

And hand shot up from the class

"We were just told in our training class, that we DO NOT take checks here."

"I'm sorry, usually we use the term 'check' to describe open transaction, the pile of paper you see next to your register."

"Ohhhhh!"

"OK, so, now we're going to pick up the check and get it on the register."

In unison, all of the trainees physically picked up the first check and put it on the register.

As you can imagine, we were not able to cover all of the topics we had scheduled for that 50 minute class, and had to schedule a second one.

We could have avoided this if we had first understood what industry our audience was familiar with, and provided a small cheat sheet of terms and phrases that they were not familiar with. I could have taken the first ten minutes of the session explaining those terms to make sure their references and my terms were understood, and then I might have made it through the entire syllabus.

Curious to hear if anyone else has this type of experience and what you would do/did to alleviate the confusion.