Naming guides/SCENARIO · PRODUCT NAMING
SCENARIO · PRODUCT NAMING · 4 min readScenario: moving from a SaaS feature list to a product-name shortlist
This is an illustrative scenario, not a customer story or a claim about a specific company. It shows how a team can use a concrete product brief to make naming trade-offs explicit before spending time on formal availability checks.
The brief
A small SaaS team is preparing a product that helps distributed teams turn customer calls into organised follow-up work. The name should feel calm and competent, work in a product navigation label, and leave room for future workflows beyond call summaries. The team wants to avoid generic AI and note-taking language.
How they narrow ideas
- Write the durable user outcome first: turning conversations into clear next steps.
- Separate direct, suggestive, and compound directions so the short list contains meaningful alternatives.
- Put each candidate beside the master brand, in a navigation item, a demo sentence, and a help-centre heading.
- Ask people outside the project what they think the product does and how they would spell the name after hearing it once.
- Move only the strongest few candidates into domain, trademark, and language checks.
The useful lesson
A product name does not need to describe every present feature. A better question is whether it gives users a useful first expectation while still fitting the product as it changes. The shortlist becomes clearer when the team records why it accepted or rejected each trade-off.