Engineers often joke that there are only two intractable problems in engineering…

1. Naming things

2. Off by one errors

If you know anything about engineering, you know that this isn’t far from the truth.

However, the truth is also that…

Oftentimes, half the battle for business and product leadership can be disambiguating and naming things well.

Names are very, very powerful.

Obviously, they are essential to creating easy symbolic handles that people can use to refer to complex concepts or objects quickly.

However, names, if used precisely, can be far more potent than that. They can also be used to…

1. Clarify the utility of a concept or entity

E.g. Movie Search Page

2. Clarify the distinguishing characteristics of the given concept or entity from other concepts or utilities (particularly those that could be confused or conflated together)

E.g. General Movie discovery vs Movie Search

3. Motivate and animate everyone toward a shared vision

E.g. Movie Search 2.0 - Featuring Next-Gen Ranking

4. Imply a namespace for adjacent concepts that fit together - helping to map the concept space

E.g. Movie Search, Movie Recommendations, Movie Rankings

5. Help drive important and implicit understanding in the problem domain

E.g. I never mentioned the company I'm referring to in the examples, but I bet you could guess which one would have such features/concepts in their product.

These few examples clearly show that naming things carefully can be a superpower for product and business leaders. It can be a key technique to accelerate everything from internal discussions, consensus building, and team alignment to external product marketing and sales.