How Do You Name a Product Feature? Inside Lytho's Creative (and, tbh) Complex Process

I was in the room where it happened. (No, not that room.) I was in the Zoom room where a group of Lythonians met to brainstorm the name of our Creative Workflow Software’s new analytics tool. But how do you name a product feature? Allow me to show you. But first …

Meet the Aforementioned Product Feature

What we now know as Lytho Insights started more as a descriptor: a collection of dashboards, housed in Workflow, that gives teams data on, well, pretty much everything. From Review stats to Campaign wins to all things Projects, these dashboards fully embrace our belief that knowledge is power. Lytho’s goal is simple: Give you the information you need to be more efficient, communicate better, and get content out the door faster.

Meet Sarah Griffin, Product Marketing Manager, Costume Queen, and All-Around Badass

(You might recognize her from her iconic appearance at the 2024 Virtual Lythopia.) When she’s not rocking swim caps at professional work events, Sarah is involved in all of our product convos. That means communicating on behalf of our product team, sharing valuable information with them, and making sure Lytho customers have all of the latest and greatest updates. It also means that when we release a new product or feature, she’s driving the discussion around its name. Because Sarah is a wonderful and generous human, she rallied a group of her Lytho colleagues (including the writer of this blog post) to join her in brainstorming namestorming.

Let the Namestorming Begin

Armed with a Miro board and each individual’s beverage of choice, we gathered to talk through the naming process. But it’s not as simple as tossing out words and seeing what sticks. Sarah put together a series of steps to help us think beyond that — and to focus on the solutions the feature provides. She also set the tone that this was a space for creativity and speaking our minds. Judgement did not RSVP to the call.

And off we went! First up, the team brain-dumped all of the words we associate with the product feature. (Psst … You can view some of those thoughts in the sticky note graphic at the top of this post.) Next, we channeled our inner improv performers with a “Yes, AND” game. The idea here was to string together a long statement that compiles different components of the feature. Honestly, I thought this would be hard, but the team had so many ideas that Sarah (a very fast typist) could barely document them fast enough.

The last thing we did was, without a doubt, my favorite exercise of all — we got weird with it. Sarah gave us a list of prompts, like “Describe this feature as a personality” and “If this feature were introduced in a commercial, what tagline might it use?” As you can see from the some of the answers in the graphic below, we did not hold back.

And the winner is …

If you read the intro to this blog post, you already know the answer, but let’s talk about how we got there.

A week after the namestorm, Sarah presented the marketing team with her two final choices: one that leaned more literal, the other more conceptual. Ultimately, we ended up where we started, finalizing the working title of “Project Insights” to Lytho Insights. The namestorming activities were super helpful in allowing the team to think through all options and confirm that our initial idea is, in fact, the best one.

Plus, we all got to play with sticky notes for an hour. #winning

Ready to unlock your business’s creative potential? Discover how Lytho’s innovative solutions can streamline your creative operations — and that includes giving your team very powerful data. Explore our features and schedule a demo today.