David Placek has spent 40+ years naming products at Lexicon Branding — Swiffer, Sonos, BlackBerry, Azure, Pentium, Vercel, Windsurf, Impossible Foods. His central argument is that most teams treat naming as a low-stakes administrative task — delegated to junior staff or tackled in group brainstorming sessions — and the cost is enormous. The right name is a competitive advantage no one can take away from you; the safe-feeling descriptive name leaves you indistinguishable in a crowded market.
His three-pillar framework: (1) Build for trust — the marketplace moves so fast now that a name must generate momentum early or fail. (2) Communicate an original idea — never describe. Anyone can describe what a company does; that name will have a thousand similar names swirling around it. Google, Pentium, and Navan beat Infoseek-style naming because they signal a new idea. (3) Be accessible — the brain doesn't remember complexity, so familiar components and clean sound patterns matter (Azure's 'z' creates a strong signal; '-zure' lands like 'sure').
For PMs naming features and surfaces, the trap is the same as for founders naming companies: descriptive names feel responsible because they're easy to defend in a stakeholder meeting. Placek's argument is that the responsibility is misallocated — descriptive names underperform precisely because they're indistinguishable, and indistinguishable products lose the discovery battle. The PM-level translation: when you name your next launch, treat the name as a strategic decision, not a documentation decision.