Standard clarity.
The NATO phonetic alphabet exists because “B” and “D” sound nearly identical over a noisy radio channel, and a misheard letter in aviation can cost lives. Alfa, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, and the eighteen letters after them were chosen, deliberately and after real testing, specifically to stay distinct through static, thick accents, and stress. It is not decoration. It is one of the most rigorously tested vocabulary standards ever designed, and it is still in daily use, unchanged in its core form, decades after it was finalized.
Engineering teams have the same noisy-channel problem without the radio static: ambiguous naming, inconsistent status words, and the quiet assumption that everyone means the same thing by “done.” A ticket marked “done” that actually means “code complete, not yet tested” is exactly the kind of ambiguity that causes real production incidents, the same way a misheard runway number causes real aviation incidents. Standardized vocabulary is the fix in both places, and it is not a bureaucratic nice-to-have, it is what keeps a handoff from becoming a guess.
This same discipline shows up in how the AW Ventures portfolio names its own states: a venture is “currently building,” not “almost done” or “in progress,” specifically because those softer phrases mean something different to every person who reads them. A shared, deliberately narrow vocabulary, agreed on in advance rather than improvised in the moment, is a small thing that prevents a large number of expensive misunderstandings.