You might know the old adage about the only two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation and naming things. Sadly, we disregard the effort people have put into naming things properly and abuse them. The other day a barista asked me if I wanted some milk in my macchiato or just foam. I’m not just a coffee snob—names should have meaning. And I’ve seen 10x engineering teams being sticklers about this as well.

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Getting Used to Ambiguity

As part of the onboarding of any new tech executive client, I start with a borderline annoying habit: I ask them to clarify lots of words that they use. That’s because words ought to mean something, and too often what they have in mind is not what I do. Worse, names might mean nothing at all. For example, how many of you have recurring ‘stand-up calls’ where no one has ever stood up? And those probably started as five-minute quick syncs now taking up almost 30 minutes with all the back and forth?

Do your sprint planning sessions consist of no real planning because a smaller group has already decided everything and is just presenting it to the team? How about P0/P1 tickets being abused to describe anything someone really wants to happen? I can go on, but I’ll assume you’re getting the gist of it by now. We’re regularly misusing names (heck, I’ve probably already done it somewhere in this article). This introduces tangible overhead to all our communication and holds your team back.

Dissonance

As with most things regarding culture-forming in your company, this rarely results in clear issues in the short term. The real problem that I see is that as your organization grows, the dissonance between what you say and what you do becomes more detrimental. When teams are smaller, it’s easier to understand what others really mean, and communication is direct enough to short-circuit issues early. Once you grow a bit, or hire people after some of these naming misuses have become customary, the newer people will have a harder time.

Further, the dissonance has a real cost of making people lose trust in the meaning of basic things. When words lose their meaning, we get things like not thinking a certain deadline is really important, that this P0 is a “genuine” one, etc. That’s not how a 10x team operates.

Merriam-Webster/Urban Dictionary

The solution is straightforward, though not necessarily easy. Start meaning what you say. Review where names have detached from what you have in your organization and decide to change it (either the name or what it is describing). Create internal glossaries.

You’d be surprised how much can be gained by declaring what a certain part of your process should actually be about, or deciding to set a real standard with your customer success department about prioritizing issues. 10x teams get there by nailing the basics first.