Naming at Scale is Best Laid Plans

Every month I get together with 5-8 other naming practitioners to talk shop, validate each other’s wildly specific professional challenges, and laugh.

It’s one of the best parts of my month.

A few months ago during one of those chats, my friend Austen Fiora was talking about some work he did leading naming at a large company. Of course, the part that caught my interest was when he started talking about how difficult the naming process was and how hard it was to move effective naming work through the org.

Another person who joins that call regularly is Caitlin Barrett, my organizational naming brother from another mother. They hadn’t joined that day but I remembered that they had worked on the naming guidelines for that very same brand Austen just finished working for.

Fast forward to me ripping hills on my bike later that week (when I get my best ideas), and it all came together:

What if I interviewed them both about what it was like to handle naming on either side of this client’s journey?

From the person charged with designing order to the person charged with enforcing it. What a unique glimpse into naming at scale. One that, as far as I know, has never been documented publicly (link me below if I’m wrong).

So I pitched the idea to them, half expecting them to say “R U serious? No.” And courageously, they both said yes.

In order to protect the client we’ll keep them anonymous but for this post to land, imagine your standard, publicly traded, large enterprise organization.

It’s a household name.

I won’t reveal the industry they’re in, but to help narrow it they’re not in healthcare, automotive, finance, retail, or taxidermy.

The client came to Caitlin a few years ago and said “Our naming is messy. Can you help us clean it up and make it consistent?”

So, Caitlin and their team were hired to create a practical naming framework and guidelines that aligned with the client’s existing internal taxonomy.

The scope was limited to more of a cleanup than a full overhaul, adding naming checkpoints into product lifecycle management and tying naming into existing knowledge management systems where it wasn’t before.

Right afterwards, Austen was brought on to the company in a contract role to support the brand. Naming was a large part of his role and he regularly interacted with Caitlin’s work during his tenure.

Caitlin was the engineer.

Austen was the operator of what Caitlin had engineered

The shorthanded idiom “the best-laid plans” means that even very carefully thought-out plans can fail or go wrong because of unexpected events.

Unexpected is a key word.

I went into this qualitative research project wanting to find out: What were those unexpected events? What unraveled for Austen that Caitlin couldn’t have foreseen in designing the naming plan that they did?

But what I found was that the derailment of naming that Austen experienced was something that Caitlin HAD foreseen in their work.

My husband works in B2B tech and told me about this gif that was circulating his org’s Slack with the caption: “Consultants be like:”

It perfectly captures the pain of the consultant’s paradox - the thing that so many naming (and brand, and probably business in general) practitioners experience: that the work you’re hired to do isn’t always what would actually solve the real problems.

You’re asked to palliate a symptom not treat the core disease.

In a gif, this was Caitlin’s experience with the client. They were hired to quickly lift up that other wine bottle and then leave, rather than being hired to really help that woman drink her two bottles of wine.

As they recounted to me, the client’s senior marketing leadership came in self-aware, asking Caitlin’s team to tame “messy” naming with clearer naming guidelines and a more coherent structure.

Credit where credit is due: I have to applaud the client for having the courage to want to approach naming on the systems level. It’s the first step. A crucial one.

But like all of us asking for help outside of our domains, we can often only point to the symptoms, not necessarily the cause.

As namers, we try to get to the root of the problem before prescribing an approach. We’re used to organizational/brand/personality issues masquerading as “naming.” But divining the root requires a thorough understanding of inner workings that are hard to discern during a new business call. Or hard for clients to even connect to the problem at hand.

Once inside, Caitlin realized that what was framed as a relatively tactical cleanup was actually a mess caused by longstanding process, system, and culture issues.

The familiar themes that emerged?

Entrepreneurial naming habits, no centralized education or enforcement, and a lot of one-off tools that had been built to address a single pain point without addressing the organization’s approach to naming as a living, breathing whole.

“This particular client was very aware that we were fighting a bigger cultural tide of entrepreneurial spirit, like ‘I want to name it whatever I want!’ They were frustrated with how much pressure there was on names, paired with how little investment there was in doing naming well. That pressure came from both the product level and senior-level folks wanting sexy names. That was made worse by a subtler cultural throughline of ‘naming is not that important. Let’s put it off till the end.’ And that’s tricky for me, because where does my lane start and end? How far can I take my scope before I’m trying to change all of a global organization’s culture?”

But as any good consultant knows, you can only lead a horse to water. You can tell the horse multiple times how tasty, cold, refreshing, and life-saving it is. You can build decks to try to get decision-makers on board with how to get the water to their horses.

You can make no one drink it.

“I need to spend a lot of time understanding where the problem is coming from before we can do anything that’s useful. …I didn’t have full visibility into where the naming problems were really coming from until the work began. That’s something I try to fight for in every project, but it can be hard to assess in the scoping phase. When I do, I often lose work because people see what they’re going to have to do upfront—it’s a lot of data gathering—and they don’t want to participate in that. They want guidelines or a new process in four weeks. So, that’s how they usually start: ‘fix our naming.’ This client was a great partner and wanted to address the problems at their core, but was up against a lot.”

Man, have I been there.

What Caitlin realized was needed was three key things that were not scoped for in their engagement:

• Beginning (Identifying the root issue early, then solving for it): The work focused on guidelines and taxonomy cleanup, but there was no deep cultural analysis or explicit work on incentives or power dynamics around naming. Caitlin noted, “It didn’t feel like it really tackled those cultural forces that are going to always keep people from following guidelines.”

• End (Implementation): There was no budget for post-launch monitoring or as Caitlin called it “a roadshow” for socializing the new guidelines. Caitlin noted, “I have not cracked the code on getting people to pay for that. And I think the cost of not doing that is so much higher than a couple extra months of an outside agency checking in.”

• Better socialization (Naming needs to be valued): There was a lack of lack of budget allocation for naming that includes engagement, awareness, and education, with naming treated as low-importance and pushed to the end of the process.

TL;DR, even after Caitlin completed their scope, they knew the work wasn’t done.

All of the voids and fissures that Caitlin had identified in their work were still there when Austen came on board.

Again, credit where credit is due: The client did make good on Caitlin’s recommendation to hire someone to manage naming.

But as Austen plainly said, “The guidelines do what you need them to do if you follow them. And a big problem state was simply people not following them.”

So, even though Caitlin had created excellent guidelines that Austen loved, appreciated and tried to enforce, he eventually ran into the same roadblocks: a lack of real ownership for driving the naming process and the organization’s overall failure to prioritize naming.

As Caitlin had experienced, the company culture wasn’t endorsing naming as important, valuable, and difficult enough to require deep process design and organizational change.

“When you’re in one of these positions, it’s almost like your entire job as a namer is that organizational psychology piece. Because the work of putting the framework into place has been done. And so you are an operator more so than…being an engineer.” - Austen

Austen, just as Caitlin did, outlined three key failure modes involving a problematic beginning, end and baseline:

• Naming process not started: Teams bypass the system entirely when a name has been “pre-ordained” by leadership or when they’ve already built significant internal momentum and “sunk cost” around a specific candidate that a team has gotten comfortable with (even if the name is suboptimal or flat-out wrong).

• Naming process not finished: Even when started, the process is often abandoned midway because the emotional momentum behind a popular (but suboptimal) name becomes too strong for the formal framework to overcome or teams exit the process and attempt to go around it, often by escalating to a higher-up they believe will be sympathetic.

• Naming process not socialized: The naming framework fails to gain traction simply because internal teams are unaware it exists, often due to a lack of broad communication or integration into their daily tools.

Everything points to a resource-slurping vacuum: Without strong authority or enforcement around naming; guidelines alone couldn’t overcome the organization’s incentive and culture issues.

Caitlin talked about how, even years ago, they had observed the cultural barriers to implementing a naming system and Austen reinforced this:

“I think the point you brought up, Caitlin, about cultural throughlines is very relevant, because that’s sort of the element that is harder to deal with through proceduralism. It’s company culture.”

This cultural challenge is further complicated by competing incentives within the organization. Austen talked about this across two roles:

Technicians: Driven by pride in their work, they often want everything named.

“I think often at the creator or technician level, it’s a genuine pride in their own work... they simply lack the holistic point of view to understand that there can only be so many named widgets and actually we don’t name widgets at this company.”

This is so real. I call this “the christening impulse.” It’s when a product team has poured months of blood sweat and tears into a key feature for months, they’ll be damned it ends up being called “customer center.”

Product marketers: Motivated to create flashy, evocative names for career impact:

“There’s a slightly more pernicious incentive at the product marketer level where product marketers get promotions based on popularizing the product that they’re putting forward... They want that flashy evocative name because it’s going to raise the profile of their little fiefdom.”

Caitlin further built on this with the metaphor of taking away these christening rights from people being like taking away their birthday present. They’re bummed:

“In their mind, naming is the fun, special part they’ve ‘earned’ after doing all the hard work. It’s the moment where they get to be creative. And what we’re saying is actually, no, there’s a system, there are rules, and sometimes your idea doesn’t fit. So it feels like we’re taking away that special moment and turning it into this transactional checkpoint. I think that’s where you get a lot of resistance to the process, because people don’t want to lose that feeling.”

Nailed it.

In talking this through, both Caitlin and Austen, and me vicariously/empathetically, felt two things: validated in what they had suspected was keeping naming from working properly and saddened by this all-to-common reality.

This reflects a sad truth that I have echoed before in other posts: When it’s broken, naming feels sisyphean.

Bear with me here for a second but this key conflict that is so central to naming at scale reminds me of how the field of economics changed over the last two centuries.

For decades, economists assumed we were all homo economicus—perfectly rational robots weighing every cost and benefit. But then behavioral economics came along and said, ‘Nope’ (shoutout to Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky). Turns out, we’re messy, emotional, and our decisions are easily swayed. It’s not about what a perfectly rational agent should do; it’s about what messy, emotional, cognitively limited humans actually do.

Naming at scale needs its own “behavioral” revolution. We need to stop asking what a perfectly rational naming process should look like and start designing for what messy, emotional, incentive-driven humans actually do over time with complex incentives in a modern corporate structure.

What can we learn from these two tenures?

If you’re tired of your best-laid naming plans unravelling, here is the inside-baseball playbook:

1. Socialization of naming by leadership: How naming is framed, supported, and endorsed within the organization is crucial. Leadership should actively speak about naming and any naming guidelines/process within the org as a strategic brand lever (top-down C-level endorsement).

2. Elevate the Role: If naming is a recurring pain point, hire someone with “Naming” in their title. Give them the built-in authority to enforce the rules.

3. Go Deeper Upfront: When you hire an agency or task a naming hire with examining the naming process, give them the time and xxx to trace the root issues. Hint: It’s almost never the names; it’s the culture.

4. Incentivize Compliance: Give people back their birthday present by rewarding teams for following the naming guidelines and process. Tie job performance to how well they adhere to the naming architecture.

5. The Meta-Review: Create a process to constantly evaluate and evolve your guidelines. They aren’t stone tablets; they’re living documents that need tending.

6. Allow Proper Implementation Time: Allow agencies or naming hires proper time to implement a new naming process. It’s worth every penny because it makes the 10s of thousands of dollars you spent on creating them actually come to fruition and then some.

7. Change Management is the Work: The best agencies and naming hires don’t just give you names; they handle the change management of creating a naming culture. With regards to agencies specifically, they should train your internal teams to be self-sufficient, not create dependency on them.

A naming system is only as strong as the organization’s willingness to value it. Without top-down endorsement and a deep understanding of human incentives, even the most engineered plans will remain just that—plans.