Glossary

The words behind shipping product.

Plain-language definitions of the concepts that make up a modern product stack — and where each one lives in Sankofa OS.

Product analytics

The measurement of how people use a product — events, funnels, retention, and cohorts — to understand behavior and improve outcomes, as opposed to page-view web analytics. See Analytics

Feature flag

A switch in code that turns a feature on or off, or targets it to a cohort, without shipping a new release. Used for staged rollouts, kill switches, and A/B tests. See Switch

Remote config

Server-controlled configuration values — copy, prices, thresholds, UI — that a live app fetches at runtime, so they can change without an app-store release. See Remote Config

Session replay

A reconstructed playback of a user's session — the screens, taps, and events they experienced — used to see exactly what happened before a bug, drop-off, or conversion. See Analytics

OTA update (code-push)

An over-the-air update that ships new interpreted code (JavaScript for React Native, Dart for Flutter) to installed apps without an App Store or Play Store review cycle. See Deploy

Crash detection

Automatic capture and grouping of app crashes and unhandled errors, with the stack trace, device context, and the release that introduced them, so incidents can be triaged fast. See Catch

Funnel analysis

A view of how many users complete each step of a multi-step flow (e.g. sign-up → activate → purchase), revealing where people drop off. See Analytics

Retention analysis

A measure of how many users return over time after a first action, usually shown as a cohort curve — the clearest signal of durable product value. See Analytics

Cohort

A group of users sharing a trait or behavior (e.g. "signed up in March" or "used checkout"), used to compare behavior and target flags, surveys, and config. See Analytics

Kill switch

A feature flag configured to instantly disable a feature in production — the fastest way to stop a bad release from affecting users without a rollback. See Switch

Staged rollout (canary release)

Releasing a change to a small percentage of users first, watching the metrics, then expanding — so a regression is caught at 5% rather than 100%. See Deploy

A/B test

A controlled experiment that shows different variants to different cohorts and measures which performs better against a defined success metric. See Switch

In-app survey

A short survey shown inside the product, triggered by user behavior, to capture feedback (NPS, CSAT, or open text) in the exact context it's about. See Pulse

OKR

Objectives and Key Results — a goal-setting framework pairing a qualitative objective with measurable key results, used to align strategy with execution. See Vision

Open-core

A model where the core product is open source and self-hostable, while commercial modules and hosting are sold on top — so users own the foundation and can't be locked in. See Sankofa OS

Self-hosting

Running software on your own infrastructure instead of a vendor's cloud, so your data never leaves your control — essential for regulated or air-gapped environments. See self-hosting

Auto-rollback

Automatically reverting a release when a monitored signal (like crash rate) breaches a threshold, so a bad deploy heals itself without a human in the loop. See Catch