There was an internal meeting where a new product called “Recruit” was announced. The first question was that “it sounds like it could be confused with a method of recruiting staff to work for us, so was that discussed?”
The manager said “to be honest, I never considered that“.
He then added there were around 20 people who were in the meetings, and no one had questioned it, or raised any objections.
A few months prior, there was an announcement about a new team that was handling branding in Marketing. We were told we couldn’t create any names without going via them. The last product names they came up with were ASSistant, and ANALytics.
I thought that if the software isn’t well received, it could easily gain a negative nickname, and people could make statements like “the software is ass”.
A Product Owner recently stated that the Assistant branding will soon be phased out, and it will just be merged into our main software’s branding. The decision came about when another Product Owner was doing a demo and had created a test user with the name “ass”. A manager flagged it as unprofessional and was concerned that we could easily demo something like that to external clients.
“you probably want to change those Ass users”
Manager
So far, the marketing naming team hasn’t got a good track record.
Stranger Coding Tings 