{"id":95195,"date":"2017-01-17T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-01-17T22:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/?p=95195"},"modified":"2019-03-13T01:06:24","modified_gmt":"2019-03-13T08:06:24","slug":"20170117-00","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20170117-00\/?p=95195","title":{"rendered":"Microspeak: ladder up"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some time ago, I encountered a new piece of Microsoft jargon. Let’s try to figure it out together. <\/p>\n

For our team presentation, we developed a theme that ties together all of the features we are working on, and how it laddered up<\/i> to something bigger than the features themselves. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I went searching through other documents looking for the phrase “ladder up” in an attempt to triangulate the meaning. Here are some more citations. <\/p>\n

These requirements are documented and ladder up<\/i> to each other so teams understand how the work is connected. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I think it’s important because it’s actually these tiny issues that ladder up<\/i> to my perception about various products. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Risk<\/b>: The organization’s strategy keeps changing.
Impact<\/b>: Trying to align experimentation to supply decision at a specific timeline cannot succeed.
Action<\/b>: Form our own vision of how to ladder up. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

At left are some of the more common pivots<\/a> we looked at in the data. Things like role, organization type, platform, and technology use. We found the segments laddered up<\/i> to three main categories identified here. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The list of potential needs will include the twelve needs currently identified (and which can be laddered up<\/i> to the four meta needs of “information”, “enrichment”, etc.). <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Confused yet? Here are some more. <\/p>\n

Company X organizes all social conversations with subject code tags, which laddered up<\/i> to branded campaigns and offerings. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

“Fast” features can be laddered up<\/i> to a strong emotional benefit which taps into a need. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Okay, so there appear to be three general categories of usage. <\/p>\n

One sense of ladder up<\/i> is that of multiple things building upon each other and reinforcing each other, usually building toward a common goal. <\/p>\n

Another sense of ladder up<\/i> is that of organizing a collection of items into a small number of groups. <\/p>\n

The third category is the ones that I can’t make any sense of. (“Form our own vision of how to ladder up.” “… laddered up to branded campaigns and offerings.”) <\/p>\n

One of my colleagues spent time in marketing and said that the phrase ladder up<\/i> was used a lot to describe how various campaigns all contributed to a common goal. <\/p>\n

So at least in marketing, the ladder up<\/i> sense is that of building and reinforcement. <\/p>\n

It’s not clear how the “organizing into a small number of groups” sense is related to that. Maybe it’s just a coincidence, and the two uses developed independently. Or maybe people heard the phrase ladder up<\/i> in a marketing presentation and decided to start using it themselves without really understanding what it means. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Let’s puzzle it out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[105,26],"class_list":["post-95195","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-microspeak","tag-other"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"

Let’s puzzle it out.<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95195","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=95195"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95195\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=95195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=95195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=95195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}