Practicing How to Come Up with the Perfect Name

Did you do your homework?  In my previous post, I suggested you try and answer the question of how to name a given software feature using the MBA method — Message, Brainstorm, Assemble.  You needed to figure out for yourself what Message you’re trying to communicate about the suggested feature, then Brainstorm a list of words to meet that goal, and finally Assemble your words in combinations until you pick 3-5 potential names for the feature.

Really, if you’re interested in learning how to come up with good names — and if you’re in the hi-tech world, you run into the name game for not only made-up marketing terms, but also technical features, products, working groups, your next start-up company — I strongly encourage you to try out this and other exercises first before continuing.

Go on, I’ll still be here.

<cue The Girl From Ipanema music>

Back?  Excellent.  Let’s compare notes.

First let’s talk about the key Message to convey to the customer.  It’s pretty straightforward.  In the unlikely event that the system is not available when a person calls, customers have an option to configure a wav file to play a prompt and transfer the caller to a phone number.  The engineering team specifically wanted to emphasize the flexibility this feature gave customers, and they wanted to avoid the word “failure” if possible.

Then, my Brainstorm.  My possible words list went like this: baseline, backup, alternative, catchall, unavailable, emergency, replacement, switch, transfer, configuration, response, alternate, failover.

That seemed like enough, so I started going through the list to Assemble options that could replace “Default Call Action.”  It helps to evaluate words individually first.  I like the word configuration in there to convey the ability of the customer to specify the response, something that default wasn’t succeeding in doing.  I liked response too instead of action because it was more directed and better captured the concept of playing the prompt.  I decided that failover wasn’t as a terrible word to use as fail or failure in this case because I thought it accurately described what’s happening.  Baseline and backup felt good too, although backup implies we’re making a copy somewhere to restore if there’s trouble, and that’s not the case.  Catchall sounded like duct tape was involved.  Emergency and unavailable both sounded too alarmist.  Alternate and alternative sounded more like lifestyles and got tangled on my tongue when I combined them with other words.

It also occurred to me, after making the word list, that I was assuming that “call” was the main noun here, since we were dealing with calls.  But if there was a problem, it was because the whole system was down… so I revisited my list and considered “system” as an alternative to “call.”  Nothing says you can’t go back.

Given that, I started to mentally Assemble a few permutations of these terms for things that sounded right when I said them out loud, and didn’t have a bad acronym (System Unavailable Configuration would be a SUCky feature name.)  The “say it loud” and “acronym” tests are two other good tricks to consider.  Here were the five name suggestions I responded with:

• Baseline Call Action
• Call Failover Configuration
• Call Backup Configuration
• System Unavailable Response
• System Unavailable Response Configuration

I checked back a few months later, and they had decided on Call Failover Configuration — and were even already abbreviating it as “CFC.”  Yes!  Is this validation of the methodology?  Perhaps.  It’s just nice to add value on the engineering side, since by trading in my Jedi robe for a black helmeted mask, my coding days are long behind me.

One extra useful sanity check when coming up with any name is to do a quick Google search.  This, plus a visit to the online patent & trademark office, is what lawyers do anyways when they do a first pass to see if there’s a risk of a trademark violation.  You may have come up with the perfect name… but found out that three other people are already using it.  Here, I see that the term is not trademarked (not a surprise, given that its generic descriptive nature would make that very difficult) and that the term “failover configuration” is used in Cisco’s product and by several other SIP-related software solutions.  If we were naming a product, this might be bad, as it would lead to market confusion.  For our purposes, this is a good thing; it means we’re in line with the industry.  We’re not trying to differentiate ourselves here, we’re trying to provide clarity and parity with competitive solutions.

I’ll walk through one more good example of the naming process in my next post, before we continue on with the broader topic of structured creativity… especially as it relates to the aliens known as creative geniuses.