Why Naming Matters: Lessons from Digitizing a Higher Education Business

I embarked on a journey to digitize a complex piece of a higher education business in November 2023, and I am still working on it.

Before we put holes in the ground, a term I would like to borrow from the construction sector, we interviewed several business units with a stake in the project. We collected their input to build our product requirement document (PRD).

During these interviews, it emerged that each business unit used different terminology to describe the parts of the project. Some talked about “Agenda Building,” some mentioned “Commitment Letters,” and others were looking for an “Expense Tracking” solution.

Subsequent meetings we ran with teams showed signs of difficulty if we didn’t use their terminology when we described the project to them. This wasn't easy when multiple teams were included in the same meeting on the project.

While ideating a product or solution with many objects, fields, and relationships, it doesn’t dawn immediately that naming could be such a key element in progress. How we name things, projects, and elements of the project changes how we perceive them and how we react to them.

The development team was the first to request a solution. They needed to label their objects and fields as they were getting ready to build the solution.

About a month or two into the project, I frequently found myself repeating the three phrases in the same sentence, “Commitment Letter / Agenda Building / Expense Tracking,” over and over in meetings and emails. With the feedback from the devs, I realized the product needed an easy-to-remember name that could help describe all of the project’s elements.

My first thought was, can I make a word from the acronyms of these phrases? With a bit of help from ChatGPT, I landed on the word ACTABLE.

The word actable means capable of being performed successfully (in a script, play, role, etc.). It conveys the message of many outcomes or being able to perform tasks.

I was very happy to start using ACTABLE in my communications with teams, and it was soon adopted by the teams when referring to the project. Our email and meeting subject lines now showed “actable,” and our epics, project descriptions, tables, and fields were labeled as such.

Once we, as an organization, made the mental leap to describe the project with a name that didn’t imply one certain part of the project, the organization felt more comfortable talking about it, and teams were more easily able to move it forward.

As a moral of the story, I’d like to close this post by saying that what you call your product or solution makes a world of difference, so take the time to find the right name.