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Discussion on: How do you come up with the product names?

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seanperkins profile image
Sean Perkins

Most of the naming for our internal projects/products either comes from topics/terminology related to the team's name and/or the projects/products purpose.

For example, the engineering team is called Hive, so many internal projects are named around bees: HoneyFlow, Nectar, etc.

We name our individual sprints on projects as well, just following a generalized topic like "animals". So each sprint is named after an unique animal (i.e. current sprint is Chilesaurus and previous sprint was Dingo).

Projects that have a purpose would be like calling an internal architecture system "Core" or calling a micro-service for connecting with different content providers, the "Content Service". Anything public would be prepended with the company's identifier (for package names). We occasionally use acronyms, but those can be a slippery slope. We call our "Document Management System", "DMS". As a general rule I don't like acronyms as they can be gate-keepers and misinterpreted for something of a different meaning.

In my experience with development and naming projects, rarely does the name make a significant impact. You obviously want to avoid offensive naming schemes, but one of the largest technology companies is called "Apple". You run the risk of trying to market yourself and compete with SEO with generalized terms (i.e. dev.to likely had steep competition initially), but good ideas often rise to the top.

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madza profile image
Madza

That's actually pretty clever to associate the product with some central subject 😉
This way you build a unique ecosystem, that is easily distinguishable by the users 😉