The Naming Diamond Exercise
A four-corner worksheet that turns a naming problem into a behavior-and-experience brief.
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 93%
When a founder or team has to name something without agency resources, Placek has them draw a diamond and label its four corners: Win (define winning), What you have to win with, What you need to win, and What you have to say to win. Working the corners — especially 'what do you have to say' — pushes thinking away from picking a word and toward defining the experience and behavior the name must carry. It's the DIY compression of Lexicon's 'Identify' phase.
Origin
David Placek's go-to coaching exercise for startups and teams doing naming in-house, and the same tool Lexicon uses internally to think about its own business.
Core principles
- 01Forget the word first; start with behavior and experience
- 02Define winning explicitly — five people in a room usually have five different definitions
- 03Startups underestimate how much they already 'have to win'
- 04The goal is a name flexible enough to still work when you can finally say what you can't say yet
- 05This is not a one-hour task — repeat it over several days
How to run it
- 1
Draw the diamond and write WIN at the top
At the top corner write 'win,' and underneath define what winning actually means for the company. Push past easy answers like 'be the dominant player' until you know what dominance concretely means.
Pro tip Get every stakeholder to state their own definition of winning — surfacing the disagreement early opens up distinct creative avenues.
Watch out A vague definition of winning ('be the leader') left unexamined produces a vague, generic brief.
- 2
Right corner: what you have to win
List the assets you already have that make you a potential winner — traction, funding, technology, a wedge. Startups routinely undervalue this because they're stressed and heads-down.
- 3
Bottom corner: what you need to win
List what's still missing — talent, resources, distribution, technical pieces. Founders often write 'a good name' here; correct it to 'the right name,' not merely a good one.
- 4
Left corner: what you have to say to win
Spend the most time here. List everything you need to say, can say, and would like to say — including things you can't say yet but want to grow into. This forces the jump from word to behavior and experience, and sets the flexibility bar the name must clear.
Pro tip Include the aspirational things you can't yet claim, then choose a name flexible enough that it still works once you can.
In the wild
Placek starts founders on a video call by having them draw the diamond rather than list names, walking them from 'what do you have to say to win' back up to defining winning. Founders begin articulating 'what we really have here is… and we're better than this,' which shifts them into experience and behavior.
→ The exercise 'sets them free' to think of the name as an experience with unlimited potential value rather than a word with limited value.
Placek contrasts Google with Infoseek to show what the diamond should surface: Google promises an experience ('not like the other guys') while Infoseek is a mundane descriptor. The diamond's 'what do you have to say' corner is meant to steer teams toward the Google end.
→ Illustrates that an experiential name creates a predisposition to consider the product, where a descriptor invites 'I already have one of those.'
Common mistakes
Jumping straight to listing candidate words
Starting with names instead of the diamond keeps the team anchored on words with limited value; the diamond first reframes the task as designing an experience and behavior.
Writing 'a good name' as what you need
Placek explicitly corrects this to 'the right name' — settling for merely good forfeits the asymmetric advantage that a distinctive, right name provides.
Is it for you?
Best for
Founders and product teams (e.g. post-YC startups) who must name something in a couple of weeks without a naming agency's resources.
Not ideal for
Teams wanting a quick descriptive label with no strategic weight, or anyone unwilling to spend several days iterating on the brief.
From the transcript
“just draw a a shape of a diamond on a piece of paper in front of you”
“put the word win right”
“now on that other next corner of the diamond what do you have to win”
“What do you need to win and then on that final angle on the left hand side. What do you have to say to win?”
“this is really should be about experience and behavior”
From the episode
Naming expert shares the process behind creating billion-dollar brand names like Azure, Vercel, Windsurf, Sonos, Blackberry, and Impossible Burger
David Placek (Lexicon Branding)