Definition of Done
A shared checklist of activities that must be completed before any work item is considered finished. The Definition of Done ensures consistent quality across the team by making quality standards explicit and non-negotiable.
The Definition of Done applies to every work item the team delivers, unlike acceptance criteria which are specific to individual stories. Common items include code review completed, unit tests passing, documentation updated, and deployment to staging verified. The DoD evolves over time as the team identifies recurring quality issues and adds preventive checks.
For AI product teams, the Definition of Done should include AI-specific quality gates: model evaluation against a holdout test set, bias and fairness checks, latency benchmarks met, fallback behavior tested, and monitoring dashboards configured. Growth teams should advocate for including analytics verification in the DoD, confirming that events fire correctly and dashboards reflect the new feature before it is marked complete. Without these checks in the DoD, teams frequently ship AI features that work functionally but lack the observability needed to evaluate their impact and iterate. A robust DoD prevents the accumulation of invisible debt that makes future optimization harder.
Related Terms
Product-Market Fit
The degree to which a product satisfies strong market demand. Achieving product-market fit means customers are actively seeking, using, and recommending your product because it solves a real and pressing problem for them.
Jobs to Be Done
A framework that defines customer needs as functional, emotional, and social jobs people hire products to accomplish. It shifts focus from demographic segments to the underlying progress customers are trying to make in specific circumstances.
Minimum Viable Product
The simplest version of a product that can be released to test a core hypothesis with real users. An MVP delivers just enough functionality to gather validated learning while minimizing development time and cost.
Minimum Lovable Product
An evolution of the MVP concept that emphasizes delivering enough quality and delight that early users genuinely love the product. It balances speed-to-market with the emotional engagement needed to drive organic word-of-mouth growth.
Design Sprint
A five-day structured process for rapidly prototyping and testing ideas with real users. Developed at Google Ventures, it compresses months of debate into a focused week of mapping, sketching, deciding, prototyping, and testing.
Lean Startup
A methodology for developing businesses and products through validated learning, rapid experimentation, and iterative releases. It emphasizes reducing waste by testing assumptions before building fully-featured solutions.