Lately at work I have been having a lot of trouble with acronyms. While I may think I know what the letters stand for, they sometimes they mean something else. For instance, everyone knows that MVP means most valuable player. In software development it means minimum viable product and refers to the bare minimum that has to be completed for a program to be considered ready for users.
Recently I attended an internal company forum in Tokyo and a speaker threw out the term ROAS. I had no idea what it meant as it is a marketing acronym and that is not my specialty. The guy that got up and spoke after him said, "ROAS or return on ad spend," and I knew what the term meant. Unfortunately I unfocused from the presentations while I tried to figure out the meaning of ROAS and missed some important information.
Should you be sending an e-mail or speaking at a conference and use acronyms, please do everyone a favor by introducing the acronym with a quick description. While you may think everyone knows what it means, there might be one or two people in the audience that will thank you for it.
As another anecdote, I once read an article on "PC" thinking it was about personal computers. Nope, the article turned out to be about political correctness. I could have saved myself a few minutes if the title had been, "The Problem with Political Correctness (PC)," instead of "The problem with PC."
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