When a team cannot agree on a project name, the disagreement usually comes down to different priorities rather than a single right answer. One person may care about brevity for use in file paths and command lines, while another wants the name to be self-explanatory for newcomers reading a repository or ticket board. A third might insist on consistency with an existing naming pattern across related projects. Before anyone argues for a specific name, it helps to ask each person to write down what they think a good name must accomplish. These written criteria become the real subject of discussion, replacing a back-and-forth over candidate words.
A practical way to record these criteria is to create a simple table where each row is one criterion and each column captures whether it is a hard constraint or a preference, who proposed it, and why it matters. For example, "must fit within 12 characters for the CI pipeline label field" is a hard constraint with a concrete reason, while "should sound natural when spoken in meetings" is a preference. Putting them side by side lets the team see which disagreements are about genuine technical limits and which are about taste. This does not resolve every conflict, but it prevents the conversation from going in circles over names when the actual sticking point is an unstated requirement.
When two criteria genuinely conflict, such as a character limit that makes a descriptive name impossible, the record should note the conflict explicitly rather than silently dropping one side. Write down which criterion takes priority for this particular project and who made that call. If the decision rests with one person, record that too. This matters because the same conflict may reappear when naming the next project, and the earlier reasoning saves everyone from rehashing it. If the priority is uncertain, mark it as open and set a condition for revisiting it, such as checking whether the CI pipeline can accept longer labels in a future update.
After the name is chosen, keep the criteria table in the same place as the naming decision itself, whether that is a project wiki page, a decision log, or a shared document. The value is not in the final name alone but in the reasoning behind it. When a new team member joins or a related project needs a name six months later, the recorded criteria give a starting point that is more useful than asking everyone to remember what was discussed. Over time, a collection of these records can reveal patterns, such as a recurring tension between brevity and clarity, which the team can then address once with a standing rule instead of resolving it name by name.