I used to think naming conventions were a tidy-up job. The sort of thing you do when a spreadsheet gets messy, or when campaign names become impossible to understand six months later.

I don't think that anymore.

Naming is much more important than that. It affects analytics, automation, reporting, onboarding, documentation and how quickly people can understand what is happening in a business.

If two teams use different words for the same thing, the business slows down. If one team uses the same word to mean two different things, it slows down even more.

This is not just engineering

There's a version of this conversation that says naming belongs to engineering.

I don't agree.

Engineering has a huge role in implementing naming consistently. Especially in product analytics, event tracking and systems where naming needs to be reliable and structured.

But the language itself has to make sense to the people using it.

If marketing, product, finance and leadership can't understand what something means, then the name isn't working. It might be technically correct, but it's not organisationally useful.

Good naming sits in the middle. It needs enough structure to be reliable and enough plain language to be useful.

Object and action

One of the simplest patterns I like is object and action.

Account created.

Payment completed.

Bank connection failed.

Campaign launched.

It sounds almost too simple, but that's the point. You can understand what happened without needing to decode someone's internal logic.

This matters when you're building reports. It matters when you're debugging. It matters when you're automating workflows. It matters when someone new joins and has to work out how the business fits together.

Bad naming creates invisible cost

The cost of bad naming rarely appears as one big problem.

It shows up quietly.

Someone spends half an hour cleaning campaign data. Someone else builds a report with three slightly different versions of the same channel. An automation fails because a value changed. A dashboard loses trust because nobody is sure what the metric includes.

None of these feel dramatic on their own.

Together, they become drag.

Where my thinking is today

Naming things well is one of the cheapest ways to make a business faster.

It doesn't require a new tool. It doesn't need a huge project. It just needs people to agree that shared language matters.

That sounds easy.

It usually isn't.

Because naming is never really about the name.

It's about whether a business can agree on what it means.