A single word brought ripe disruption to one of the world’s largest prediction markets.

People placed bets on whether Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, would be seen wearing a suit. He is known for not wearing formal attire. Zelensky’s home country is defending itself against Russia, so I understand if styling isn’t top of mind.

Players spent more than $200 million betting on the outcome. Would Zelensky wear a suit before July?

After Zelensky was seen at the NATO conference (photo above), the market was initially resolved as “yes.”

The decision sparked many debates online about whether this attire is a suit. Those who bet on “no” objected and escalated the bet to a third-party dispute resolution system.

Many debated the definition of a suit.

The creator of the attire was asked to give a verdict. Is it a suit?

A men’s fashion industry commentator was asked to weigh in. “Both a suit and not a suit,” he said.

There were controversies around the dispute system itself, which is said to be broken, manipulative, and undermining factual correctness.

Regardless of whether we think it’s a suit or not, I found the $200 million controversy to be a powerful example of how misunderstandings can arise in the absence of clear definitions and shared understanding.

Before you say “Delfina, we’re a small company, we’re not operating at this scale” and dismiss this as irrelevant because you’re at a smaller company, consider that the principle is the same even when you don’t have $200 million at stake: How can you identify and prevent important terminology from turning into a costly mistake?

Reviewing your main offerings’ copy every few months ensures that your clients see up-to-date, accurate information. How do you decide what to review? 👇

Identify the most impactful touchpoints of your product area. Factors to consider include:

• usage frequency – how often users interact with and use your product
• potential risks, i.e., communications around pricing plans, billing, ethical concerns, outages, technical limitations
• revenue sourcing, focusing on the most profitable or costly areas for the company. For example, I was surprised to see that YouTube only makes up 10.26% of Google’s revenue.

Go deeper to identify additional critical interaction points:

• What are your cross-functional partners saying?
• Have your customer service representatives shared any concerns or feedback?
• What are your users talking about in Reddit?
• What are the emotional states of the user as they interact with your product?
• Are you paying attention to temporal landmarks in the product, i.e., the fact that our memory of an experience is largely shaped by how it ends?

The process of building a business glossary can help you identify potentially costly terminology and avoid misunderstandings by clarifying ambiguous language across internal teams and user interfaces.

Here’s a quick intro into business glossaries 👇

The connections between words and costs aren’t always obvious. But they’re present and waiting to be found, even if they’re not staring us in the face as hard as $200 million. Important connections are detectable through technical analysis, conversations with other people, and general openness.

Gambling involves risk. People with a gambling addiction are 15 times more likely to die by suicide than the general population. Please only gamble with funds that you can afford to lose.