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Project Code Name
Why do corporate restructuring plans get code names the way operating systems do? And why are the names often so bizarre?
“[W]hen several stations are connected by the same wire, the attention of the particular station for which the message is destined must be secured. This is done by signalling, not the full name of the station, which would occupy time, but an abbreviated name, consisting of two or three letters, assigned to that particular station and known as its code name. Thus, LV is Liverpool, EH Edinburgh, and so on.”
— A passage from a 1888 issue of The English Illustrated Magazine, a turn-of-the-century periodical, discussing how the British Post Office used code names to help make sense of the complexities of the telegraph system. (This appears to be one of the first uses of the term “code name.”) Eventually code names would expand to businesses in general, with New York City setting up a central bureau for registered addresses in 1919, with the goal of avoiding mix-ups on the telegraph line. (Think of them as the domain names of the 1920s.)
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The code name has become an essential part of how the tech industry operates
When you’re building a project, and you don’t quite know where it is and what it’s going to turn into yet, a code name can be quite an asset. It’s a tool that can help a project coalesce around a set of ideas, and it doesn’t necessarily need to be something that the public ever sees.
In fact, it may actually be better if the public never knows about them. Often, you don’t want to reveal something while it’s incubating. As the Tumblr site Ask a Gamedev put it in 2022:
It’s important to note that the reason for secrecy is primarily for marketing purposes. We want to keep a big project quiet until we’re ready to show it and get players excited for it. If our product is tied in with another product or IP with a big planned push at some point in the future, tipping our hand too early can lead to a cascading set of reveals we or our business partners were unready to make. For example, revealing a new mainline Pokémon game too early would spill the beans on an entire new Pokémon generation, which would affect merchandise, animated series, and so on. As a result, we usually put in safeguards to prevent such leaks from happening, both punitive and practical.
Code names, also known as code words, have a long history that often criss-crosses through the two World Wars, and perhaps through some of the world’s largest intelligence agencies. That they bled into business is not wholly surprising, as large companies deal in trade secrets all the time—even fast-food chicken restaurants.
But what’s unusual is that, particularly in the technology industry, these code names often have a long shelf life, one that can stick around for years after the fact. The word Mozilla, the name of the company that produces Firefox, started as the code name of Netscape Navigator, the web browser upon which Firefox is based.
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It wasn’t like the Netscape team hid it—back in the ’90s, employees of the company actually decked out Mozilla gear in photos for the San Francisco Chronicle.
“Every great project starts out with a T-shirt, and to make a good T-shirt you need a good code name, something like ‘Terminator’ or ‘T-Rex,’” Gene Wang, a software development manager at Symantec, told the Chronicle in 1996. (Apparently he was not aware Mozilla already had the dinosaur metaphor covered.)
The technology industry has long been shaped by code names, to the point where those code names break out of their holding cage and end up defining the product. Apple in particular is infamous for this, with the animal and landmark names that define MacOS starting as code names but eventually becoming product names.
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Operating systems are a natural reason to have a code name, by the way. In a Bluesky thread from 2024, Microsoft old hand Larry Osterman, who has been at the company for more than 40 years, explained how these code names, such as “Chicago,” the nickname for Windows 1995, would bleed into the public discourse. They existed because these were lengthy projects that existed before the marketing team had weighed in on a name. However, the dynamic that necessitated these monikers has faded somewhat.
“Code names leak. Both to the public and into other artifacts (files with code names in them, config settings, etc.),” he wrote, explaining why references to Chicago appear in the operating system. “And in a world where you release every 3-6 months, you really don’t need code names, because the release is so small.”
(Someone tell that to the Ubuntu team, which famously gives its twice-yearly iterations alliterative animal-themed code names, most recently “Questing Quokka.” I imagine that must get hard to plan for on Q releases.)
And while software release schedules have gotten faster, internal projects still need code names, and sometimes there are so many code names that you need a system to manage them. In a 2007 blog post, Stack Exchange co-founder Jeff Atwood said his team went through so many that they had to develop a system to generate new ones.
“The names are chosen alphabetically from a set of items; every new project gets a name from the set,” he wrote. “We start with A, and when we finally arrive at Z, we pick a new set of items for project name inspiration.”
Microsoft has so many code names that it has a quite-long Wikipedia page dedicated to them. So does Apple.
But as far as I can tell, they have yet to give their layoffs a code name.
“I don’t want to spell out the idea on the insecure email channel. Even if you say the phrase ‘Video H or N’ in public, people will know what you mean, so let’s just call it Video. Don’t say it in combination with the H or N site :)”
— Jawed Karim, one of the co-founders of YouTube, discussing (according to Internal Tech Emails) how the trio of co-founders, still at PayPal, should talk about their formative idea that would end up taking over the world. (What’s “H or N”? Easy: The platform was originally intended to be a HotOrNot for video. That was too specific—but it ended up inspiring the actual idea.)
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But enough about startups and operating systems. Do companies really give their layoffs code names?
When a company is attempting to do something sensitive, like poach a CEO, it’s likely they may not want to spell out exactly what is going on before they pull the trigger.
Case in point: In the months before Yahoo! brought on Marissa Mayer as their CEO, Mayer had to frequently talk about the shift in secret. She was still working at Google, and there was also the risk the news would leak to the media. So what did she and Yahoo! do? They gave the initiative a code name, “Project Cardinal.” This allowed her to set up her exit plan in secret, while avoiding, say, tipping off her limo driver.
Mayer got hired rather than fired in that situation, but one presumes that a similar motivation might lead a company to bury an initiative behind a code name.
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It can also provide organizational cover when doing something that negatively harms employees. To offer an example: Red Robin recently announced the closure of a number of restaurants as part of a broader “North Star” initiative aimed at improving service while fighting against a wave of shutdowns. (They’re not alone: Last spring, the fast food chain Jack in the Box announced its “Jack on Track” plan, which includes a “restaurant closure program.”)
Eventually, things can get more serious than these situations, which require more intense strategizing. There’s a term for what these companies are doing: “Turnaround management,” which refers to the optimization of businesses to stay solvent. Turnarounds can happen at any time in a business’ history, though the concept is most associated with businesses nearing bankruptcy.
These plans can really hurt, as in the case of Ford’s “Way Forward,” first undertaken in 2006. That plan involved more than 25,000 job cuts, which was dramatic and painful—but it helped Ford avoid the brutal bailouts General Motors and Chrysler required. In 2009, while those companies were barely holding on, Ford actually posted a profit.
Which is to say that, while turnaround plans can seem callous and unfair to affected workers or even customers affected by decreased service, they can absolutely save companies. It’s a bloodletting tool.
But that’s not to say every turnaround code name is a good one, and the worst ones can signal a sense of panic, as noted in a 2015 on the topic in Bloomberg (archive link).
“There are different degrees of distress,” turnaround consultant Margaret Bogenrief told the outlet. “Generally, the more grandiose the name, the more severe the distress.”
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Of course, there can be a degree of silliness that comes with anything complex and corporate. Around 2015, General Mills announced not one, not two, but three separate corporate restructuring projects: Project Compass, Project Century, and Project Catalyst. These three projects each touched on different parts of the company, with Project Compass focused on its international markets, Project Century its North American manufacturing, and Project Catalyst its organizational effectiveness. These projects cost hundreds of millions of dollars collectively and came with more than 1,500 layoffs. And to the layperson, it just sounds hopelessly complex.
Kellogg’s, meanwhile, had been down this road multiple times itself. In 2009, the company announced K-LEAN, an initiative to increase optimization (and which led to layoffs in its factories). Then, in 2013, they followed it up with Project K, which aimed to reorganize the various company segments … and which also led to layoffs.
Ultimately, Kellogg’s decided to split off its legacy cereal business into its own company, WK Kellogg Co., and rename the larger snack food business as Kellanova. Both companies ended up getting sold to large candy companies recently—WJ Kellogg to Ferrero, Kellanova to Mars.
With this framing, turnaround projects can be seen as corporate salvaging missions first, layoff plans second. But honestly, that struggles to explain Amazon, a company that made $21.2 billion in net income in the prior quarter alone. Sometimes a job cut is just a job cut, no turnaround necessary.
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Five typical naming schemes for corporate projects
- Leaning into the puns and metaphors. It’s not just Jack in the Box leaning into the punny turnaround project names. Companies do this all the time— A 1991 Reuters wire story, for example, describes how Bank of America named an attempted acquisition of Security Pacific “Project Sunshine,” while another attempted merger was named after the companies’ local NHL teams. More recently, Panera announced its “Panera RISE” strategy, which plays off its most popular product.
- Proposing an upgrade. I’ve traditionally been sort of snarky about Dell, a company that in my mind screams “enterprise” and “lack of creativity.” So I guess when I hear Dell once named a reorganization effort “Dell 2.0,” the thought that runs through my head is, “checks out.” More recently, Intel has also gone down this road with its IDM 2.0 project for expanding its manufacturing—though Pat Gelsinger got booted before fully seeing it through.
- Dropping a strong hint. After hiring a new CEO good enough to make Howard Schultz go away, Starbucks leaned into a turnaround plan called “Back to Starbucks,” which is what it wants customers to do. (Similarly, JCPenney’s endeavor is called “Yes, JCPenney.”) This also works when the goal is laying people off—as shown by Kellogg’s K-LEAN, mentioned above.
- Setting a deadline. Turnaround strategies are often built around significant goals. Sometimes, those goals include dates—and sometimes those dates are way out, as seen from German automaker Opel, which set a “DRIVE!2022” campaign way back in 2013. (They really wanted to get ahead of that date.) Some other examples include Air France-KLM’s “Perform 2020,” and the Trump administration’s “Project 2025.” Yes, even political parties do it.
- New-agey abstraction. But most notably, so many turnaround project names fall into vague, shapeless territory, not necessarily setting a goal as much as a subtle hint as to where they want to go. General Mills’ “Project Catalyst” is a great example of this, as is Red Robin’s “Operation North Star” and Amazon’s aforementioned Project Dawn. Another example is “Project Phoenix,” set into place by Newell Brands, the owner of the Coleman, Rubbermaid, and Yankee Candle brands. Perhaps it’s because “Project Mass Layoff” doesn’t roll off the tongue quite so easily.
“Simplification often feels risky because it appears to be a contraction. But in a turnaround, complexity is a liability.”
— Daniel Schmeltz, a corporate transformation expert, writing in Fortune about why most corporate turnaround endeavors fail. In the piece, he argues that slow-going turnaround plans are typically the most unsuccessful. “Hesitation and complexity are liabilities; clarity and rapid execution are non-negotiable,” he writes. “In a time when so many companies are attempting a turnaround, by acting decisively, businesses can cut through inertia, rebuild momentum, and secure sustainable results.” If you’re going to chop off a limb or two, get it over with—perhaps with a little less creativity in the code name.
I think code names naturally engender discomfort for people, in part because of what they represent. They are often used to hide something from view, and that thing can be nefarious, even troubling.
Recently, Cleveland Guardians pitcher Emmanuel Clase has faced allegations that he was receiving money from “microbets” made on his own pitches. In other words, he was manipulating pitches to secure winning bets on himself, then gamblers were sending some of that money his way.
When talking about this with one of the betters, they reportedly hid what they were doing by using coded language, like “rooster” and “chicken.” Clase has attempted to claim that they were discussing cockfighting rather than pitching, an activity Clase also gambled on. (Interesting defense strategy—I wasn’t gambling on games, I was gambling on animal abuse.)
Clase was (at least based on allegations in court records that he has denied) trying to get away with something nefarious. Broken down, the reason for the cloak-and-dagger stuff was not all that dissimilar to why Marissa Mayer did it.
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One might argue that many of the above listed companies were trying to shroud their not-so-friendly plans in friendly language. You can’t quite say, “we need to lay thousands of people off,” and you definitely can’t say “we want to lay thousands of people off.” But to cloak it in “Phoenix,” “Dawn,” or “North Star,” it makes the bad news digestible. It makes room for a little compassion for the HR team as they’re delivering the bad news.
Well, unless you’re an executive for Amazon and you casually drop a doublespeak-style code name in everybody’s inbox.
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