Naming Things: When Your Product Names Hide the Product

There’s a moment in the life of most software companies when the features start getting names. Not descriptions. Names. The reporting module becomes Insights. The permissions system becomes Guardian. The scheduling feature becomes Flow, or Pulse, or Orbit. It feels like maturity. Real companies have named products, so naming your products must make you a real company. But something subtle and expensive happens at that moment: your website stops describing what you sell and starts describing your org chart.

Consider what a name actually is. A name is a pointer. It’s useful precisely because it’s short: instead of saying “the system that decides who can see which documents,” you say “Guardian” and everyone nods. But the nod only happens if everyone has already loaded the mapping from name to thing. Inside your company, everyone has. The name saves time in every meeting. That’s why teams invent them, and inside the building they’re genuinely good.

Then the name escapes onto the homepage, and the economics invert. Your visitor has never loaded the mapping. To them, “Guardian” is not a pointer to anything. It’s a word that must itself be explained, which means your navigation now reads like a menu in a language they don’t speak. Products: Orbit, Pulse, Guardian, Insights. A visitor who wants to know whether you do scheduling has to click into each one and translate. Most won’t. They came with a question, you answered in code, and they left. An invented name without shared context isn’t branding. It’s encryption, and you didn’t give the visitor the key.

The seduction here is that the names sound better than the descriptions. “Orbit” is sleeker than “employee scheduling.” Founders hear the flatness of “employee scheduling” and flinch, because they’ve read it a thousand times and it bores them. But boredom is another symptom of the curse of familiarity. The visitor hasn’t read it a thousand times. The visitor has read it zero times, and is searching for exactly those flat words, literally searching, typing “employee scheduling software” into Google. This is the practical knife-twist: search engines index words, not intentions. If your page says “Orbit” everywhere the market says “scheduling,” you’ve hidden yourself from the one query that matters. You will rank magnificently for your invented word, which nobody searches for, because you invented it.

There’s a version of this disease at the company level too. Some startups name the company after nothing, name the product after something else, and then coin proprietary terms for each concept inside the product. Users aren’t users, they’re Navigators. Projects aren’t projects, they’re Journeys. Every coined term is a small toll booth on the road to understanding, and tolls compound. A visitor might pay one. Ask them to pay five before they even know what you sell, and they’ll take a different road.

The honest defense of naming is that some names do earn their keep. When a feature is genuinely novel, when there is no existing phrase for it, a name can crystallize the concept. And once a product has enough customers, the name acquires meaning through use, the way “Photoshop” stopped being a coined word and became a verb. But notice the order of operations. The meaning came from thousands of people using the thing, and the name absorbed it. Names soak up meaning; they don’t generate it. A startup borrowing the naming style of Adobe or Salesforce is borrowing the costume without the body. Those companies can afford opaque names because they spend enormous sums teaching the market what the names mean. You are not going to out-teach the market on a startup budget. You’re going to out-plain it or lose.

My working rule is that on a homepage, every name must be chaperoned by a description, and the description does the real work. “Orbit — drag-and-drop shift scheduling” is fine; the name rides along and can accumulate meaning over the years while the plain words carry today’s load. When I look at audit results in GazeSite, one of the most common clarity failures is exactly this: a navigation bar and a features grid full of orphaned proper nouns, confident and gleaming and mute. The fix costs nothing. Put the plain words back. Let the names be nicknames, not passwords.

The general principle underneath all this is that clarity is a form of humility. Naming things after yourself, in your own private language, is a way of making the visitor come to you. Describing things in the visitor’s language is a way of going to them. Early on, you have no leverage to make anyone come to you. So go to them. Call the scheduling feature scheduling. When you’re big enough that the market chases you, you can call it whatever you want, and by then you probably won’t want to.