Journal · 12 March 2026

Event names that survive a reorg

Most tracking plans die of kindness. Someone says yes to one more event “just in case,” and six months later nobody can say what cta_click_v3 meant to the team that shipped it.

In Event Taxonomy Lab we begin with a rule that sounds petty: an event name is a sentence fragment a designer can read aloud. plan_selected passes. btn_submit_paywall_exp2 does not, because it smuggles a test, a component, and a mood into a single token.

Name the product action, not the widget

Widgets change when a new design system arrives. Product actions change when the business does. If you name the button, you have volunteered to rename history. If you name the choice the person made — selected a plan, started a transfer, dismissed the consent sheet — the warehouse still parses after the pixels move.

This is slower than dumping the component tree into Mixpanel. It is also the only way a new squad, hired after a reorg, can read last year’s funnel without a séance.

Keep the dictionary on one page

We ask cohorts to fit the living vocabulary on a single printed sheet. When it will not fit, something is vanity or something is two events pretending to be twelve. Properties belong in a second column, not as suffixes that create a combinatorial explosion.

Past students from Product Signal Studio often arrive with ninety events and leave with thirty-two. The missing fifty-eight were not insight. They were fear of deleting a row.

Treat aliases as a diplomatic record

When a name must change, keep the old token as an alias with a retirement date. Do not pretend the past did not happen. Boards ask about trends; trends need continuity. A quiet alias table has saved more quarterly reviews than a heroic migration.

If you want a room in which to practise this on a messy export, the Taxonomy Lab is the door. If the whole map is fog, start with the Signal Atlas.