The Made-Up Name Reset
Give a team or feature a name nobody recognizes, so nobody can skip the argument about what it should be.
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 93%
Miller's most tactical takeaway: a familiar name is a shortcut that carries preconceptions in with it. Call something a 'browser history feature' and everyone knows what you mean — which is both the benefit and the entire problem, because they arrive with a fixed idea of what it must be. Naming it something unfamiliar forces the team to argue from first principles about what it actually is, and the argument is the value. It is a rhetorical tactic, not novelty for its own sake.
Origin
Josh Miller, offered as the explicit 'tactical piece of advice' of the episode and used to explain why The Browser Company has a membership team, a storytelling team, and no PM org. Lenny supplies the historical precedent: Airbnb spent about eighteen months calling product managers 'producers' because a founder wanted to produce beautiful experiences rather than manage product — which had the side effect of attracting Emmy-winning producers as applicants.
Core principles
- 01Every familiar name is a package of inherited assumptions about what the thing must be and do.
- 02The benefit of a known name (everyone instantly knows what you mean) is identical to its cost (everyone instantly knows what you mean).
- 03The made-up name is a forcing function: because nobody knows what it is, the team must define it out loud.
- 04It is not novelty for novelty's sake — it is a rhetorical tactic to force truly first-principles thinking.
- 05It's a two-way door. If you end up back at the conventional name, you have lost nothing and gained the conversation.
- 06Names change who applies: 'producer' at Airbnb pulled in a stream of actual film producers.
How to run it
- 1
Notice when you've reached for a category word
Catch yourself naming a project or team with an off-the-shelf term — 'history feature', 'customer success', 'PM org'. That word is where the thinking is about to stop.
- 2
Ask what could be, and coin from the answer
Apply the 'start by asking what could be' value: state what you are actually trying to do for the person, then invent a name that fits that intent rather than the incumbent category.
Pro tip The best coinages describe the relationship or the aspiration (membership, storytelling), not the mechanism.
- 3
Force the definition conversation
Because nobody knows what the new word means, insist the team articulate it: what does this team do, what are its incentives, what disciplines sit on it, how does it relate to design? That conversation is the whole point — Miller argues Airbnb's 'producer' era got far more intentionality precisely because nobody knew what a producer was.
Watch out If nobody actually asks 'what is this?', the rename has failed and you have only added jargon.
- 4
Let it revert without shame
If the end state is that producers are just PMs, that is fine. The rename is a two-way door; the value was banked in the thinking it forced, not in the label surviving.
In the wild
The Browser Company's unusual org names are not branding: calling the team 'membership' rather than customer success, or 'storytelling' rather than marketing/PR/IR, forces the team to re-derive what the function is actually for instead of importing the standard playbook.
→ Org structures that Miller can defend from first principles, and content and member relationships that outsiders say they have never seen before.
For roughly eighteen months Airbnb called its product managers 'producers', because a founder said they didn't want to manage product, they wanted to produce beautiful experiences like a movie producer. Nobody knew what a producer did, so the company had to talk explicitly about the role and its relationship to design.
→ A far more intentional definition of the role — plus a flood of job applications from actual Emmy-winning producers.
Common mistakes
Renaming for novelty
Miller is explicit that this is not novelty for novelty's sake. A cute name with no accompanying first-principles conversation is pure overhead and reads as affectation.
Keeping the familiar name to reduce friction
The comfort of 'everyone knows what you're talking about' is exactly what imports the preconceived notions of what the thing has to be. That friction was doing work.
Treating the name as permanent
Locking in the invented word turns a thinking tool into dogma. It's a two-way door — the point is the conversation, not the vocabulary.
Is it for you?
Best for
Product and org leaders about to build a feature or team in a well-trodden category, who want to escape the incumbent's assumptions before design starts.
Not ideal for
Teams that need fast alignment with outside partners, recruiters or customers who rely on standard vocabulary, or organizations already drowning in internal jargon.
From the transcript
“a byproduct of some of these experiments that we found works really well is when you give something a new name it sheds a lot…”
“of what the thing should be we found that even with products so if you say you're building a browser history feature then people that…”
“novelty for novelty's sake it's meant to almost be a rhetorical tactic to make people think truly first principles about what are we trying to…”
“and so ultimately that may have been a failure in other ways but that's one of the things we found tacked to be really helpful…”
From the episode
Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product
Josh Miller (CEO)