It’s the little things …

… that make the difference between good/fun and not-so-good/not-so-fun.

Terminology for example. (Oy, here he goes again on the name thing!) There are a fair number of things that have to be named when you’re trying to make something from nothing.  The company, the product, individual projects, components, workflow states and transitions, interfaces, even the term you use to describe customers (guest, client …).  They all have to be named.  And as close readers of this blog know (Hi Mom!) the first name you pick for something usually sucks.  Which means that not only does everything have to be named, it usually also has to be renamed.

When product (and seriously it’s always those guys leading the renaming charge) decides to rename something it takes a while for the terminology to work its way through the org, whether your company is 4 people or 400.  For some things, in some organizations, you never really flush out the old name.  The dual names then become a form of low-level, everyday friction.  C’est la guerre, right?  Well, no, it’s not.

I was forced to think about this by a stark counter-example.  I was sitting in a meeting one day, not paying much attention when I realized that we’d been talking for awhile and all three people from one particular group had nailed the just-changed-yesterday name for the product in question every single time.  The rest of us were all over the map.  It stuck in my head as a data point that probably meant something.

bossPersonally, I was always bad at this and tended to hang on to the old names.  I’m not very good at remembering people’s names so why should it be any different for things?  But when I thought about it, I realized that I didn’t hang on to old names for things because I couldn’t remember the new ones, at least not most of the time.  It was because I thought that renaming things was stupid and I was annoyed and often had “the juice” politically to get away with hanging on to the old name.  Passive aggression at its finest.

Very occasionally I see product people get annoyed by this phenomenon, but I’ve never seen anyone take it seriously.  From the product side of the house I suspect that this inability to make a name-change and have it stick quickly is a low-level irritant that decreases their effectiveness and quality of life, but never rises to the level of “I have to do something about this”.  It’s one of those things that leaves you pissed off but you’re not really sure why.  Well now you know why – you’ve been passively aggressed.

When you’re building a team and trying to get some momentum this is one of the little things you can watch, and use to prevent problems you’d otherwise have to ‘fix’ later, probably by firing someone’s sorry ass.  Somebody who consistently uses old terminology is actually arguing with your right to name things.  He’s saying “you’re not the boss of me”.  Fix him now, or fire him later.

For my part, hereby resolved – the next time I’m leading a crew, this is one of the things I’ll be paying attention to, for myself and for the crew.  Perhaps I’ll make a point of explaining it up-front. Or now that I recognize the root of the issue maybe I’ll just jump on anyone who’s not with the program.  Fair warning.  And to all the product people in my past – my bad.