Lena was building a new filtering tool for the company's internal registry to help developers find specific project names. Mark suggested making the search more flexible by allowing a dot to stand in for any single character and a star to represent zero or more of the character preceding it. For instance, a search pattern like 'a*' would successfully find a project named 'aa' because the star allows the 'a' to repeat as needed. This ensures the filter matches the entire name exactly from start to finish.