Breaking up with a Term

Although it may seem simple, naming features is not easy. It can be difficult to name features correctly, but once you do so, you will have something that will guide you in the future and influence your development decisions. This will ensure that the feature is simple over time. If you have a folder, there isn’t much to do other than to name it folder. Although you may create a folder that displays content according to certain criteria, it is likely that you will name it something else (Smart Folder, for example). To be able to satisfy all the complexities of Kanban Board, you must create a feature roadmap that covers several releases. While this may be a complex development process, you are also binding yourself to a specific methodology by naming a Kanban Board feature. This is because your customer will expect that you continue to develop in that direction. Generic terms can mean a lot, but heavy, specialized terms often only mean one thing (or two, if you’re lucky). This lesson was learned when we freed potential that was held back by Milestones. Milestones can be used in project management, but they are a general term. They have many implications for your workflow. I will focus on the negative implications of ActiveCollab’s past that were very damaging: Milestones are used for long-term projects and complex projects. They are not needed in simple projects, so they are only useful for large teams working on complex projects.
Milestones can’t be thrown away. They are not disposable.
They lock tasks in. A milestone is a set of expectations that a task must be completed within the timeframe. If a task isn’t completed and needs to be moved to another milestone, it can be a sign that you are doing something that shouldn’t be happening.
Milestones must have a date. They are not considered milestones if they do not have a date. You can add a friction point to require a date or make it optional, and you end up with a milestone which is not really a milestone.
Over the years, our team became so familiar with the term that we never thought twice about changing it. We discovered problems, such as the need for milestones without a due date. We worked around it by letting users set milestone’s due dates “to be determined” instead of fixing the name. This was done to avoid confusion and to give us a fresh perspective that wasn’t tied to any feature or name in the software. Things started to happen quickly and milestones were replaced by a more general name, task lists. This allowed for some great improvements to the Tasks tab, which we’ll discuss next. It also lifted constraints from labels and made ActiveCollab task managing less strict (and thus more likely to be used even by non-project managers).
This lesson teaches us that feature names are far more powerful than we think. Tweet this. They help users understand your software and can drive their future development and expectations. You should be careful when choosing feature names. If you are in the business of selling,