We, as Product Managers, are always told:

“Focus on problems, not solutions”

And we, as Product Managers, nod along and agree:

“Yes, yes, I always focus on the problem. I just wish everyone else in my organisation could stop talking about solutions”.

And then we, as Product Managers, go and call our next projects:

Message Archive

Reorganise Homepage

Payment History

Once you call a project by the name of the solution it becomes much harder to focus on why you’re implementing the solution in the first place. The objective of the project becomes do this thing, not solve this problem. You lose sight of the ‘real why’.

Human minds are lazy and will attach great importance to shorthand and proxies. It’s easier to think about the name of the project than it is to think about the purpose of the project itself.

This is dangerous if we name our project after the solution, but is something we can turn to our advantage by naming a project after the problem it’s trying to solve. This forces our lazy human minds to focus on the problem we're trying to solve, and can help us understand when we're ‘done’. We’re not ‘done’ when we’ve built a ‘Message Archive’; we’re ‘done’ when users no longer have messages in their inbox that they consider irrelevant.

Let’s try renaming our projects so that they reflect the problems they're supposed to solve:

~~Message Archive~~ - Users don’t need all the messages in their inbox

~~Reorganise Homepage~~ - Users can’t find the most important stuff on the homepage

~~Payment History~~ - Users need to see how much money they’ve spent

Words matter. Name your project after its real why.