Product Naming Framework

Lead content designer; piloted the process, built reusable resources for other CDs

Scope: Led naming for Workstream; built a lightweight evaluation template and naming risk-assessment framework; supported renames of 65+ products across Supply, Accounting, and Enterprise Engineering

TL;DR: Naming at Meta is a small thing that’s secretly enormous — stakeholder negotiation, a leadership review, a potential blocker. I led the Workstream naming effort, then turned what I learned into a lightweight evaluation template and a risk-assessment framework that other content designers used to rename 65+ products across multiple orgs. The reusable resources reached more people than the product itself did.

Context

Naming work was treated as bespoke every time. Each content designer reinvented the wheel — the evaluation rubric, the leadership presentation deck, the way to surface and weigh stakeholder input. Downstream, this meant bad names that had to be retired, leadership reviews that stalled, and sprints that ate weeks because a process for it simply didn’t exist. The work itself isn’t hard — the meta-work was missing.

Reframing

The brief was “name Workstream.” The reframing: if I’m building the toolkit anyway, I should build it for the next ten naming projects, not just this one.

Decisions

1. Codify the evaluation template the first time it works, not the third. I could have refined the template privately across multiple projects before publishing. Instead I shared it after Close Platform and Financial Planning Center, knowing the next content designers would help me iterate. Cost: a rougher first version. Benefit: it actually existed when other people needed it.
2. Treat the leadership-review step as the load-bearing artifact. Most content designers treat the naming work itself as the hard part and the leadership presentation as the wrap-up. I treated it the other way — the resource I wrote is specifically about how to get leadership approval, because that’s where naming projects actually die.

What shipped

• A lightweight evaluation template, standardized via Close Platform and Financial Planning Center renames, shared with Core Experiences as a potential org-wide CD resource
• The Workstream naming evaluation note (908 reads)
• A CD resource for getting leadership approval on names (783 reads)
• A naming risk-assessment framework, piloted in Supply and Accounting naming sprints, discussed with Internal Foundation peers as a possible standardized framework
• Two product-specific naming notes for Close Platform and Financial Planning Center

Outcomes

• Measured: 783 + 908 + ~700 reads across the published notes; contributed to renames of 39 Supply products and 26 Accounting products (65 total)
• Qualitative: “Thanks Kade Dalton for writing such an excellent note on product naming and reviews with so many great resources linked… I’m bookmarking this as the gold standard reference.” — Content Designer. “Thanks Kade for your advocacy in finding the most effective name for our products. Naming is such a difficult thing because it’s so visceral and everyone has an opinion, but you approach it with an inclusive and detail-minded framework, making it easy for people to rally behind.” — Stakeholder
• Downstream: Established the practice of content designers publishing reusable resources out of project-specific work; the naming risk-assessment framework was discussed for standardization across Internal Foundation

What this taught me

The reusable resource will reach more people than the project will — optimize accordingly. This is the move that connects every system I’ve shipped since: the Pulse content system, the AI Autonomy Framework, the Risk Figma plugin, the rd-eval rubric. Do the work for the project in front of you, but design the substrate for the next ten projects you’ll never see. The compounding is what makes the work senior.