Event names that survive a redesign

Most tracking plans fail at the moment a designer moves a chip. The event was called home_chip_click, which was accurate for six weeks and then became a lie. App Analytics inherited the lie, dashboards kept counting, and a year later nobody could say whether “engagement” meant a job completed or a pixel that no longer exists.

The Event Catalogue week in our atelier is deliberately clerical. Students bring the live names. We ask three questions that sound insultingly simple and then take an afternoon: what job does this record, who owns the name, and what would make us retire it.

Verbs before components

Prefer saved_listing to heart_icon_tap. Prefer started_trial to paywall_cta_primary. The first pair will still be true when the heart becomes a bookmark and the primary button becomes a sheet. The second pair is a diary of the interface.

Properties can carry the component if an engineer truly needs it for a bug. The event name should remain boring. Boring names are a gift to the person who joins the company after you leave.

Versioning without archaeology

Suffixes like _v3 are how a catalogue admits it has no retirement process. If the meaning changed, rename and document the mapping. If the meaning did not change, keep the name and stop performing progress in the string.

We keep a one-page ledger of retired events: old name, new name or none, date, and the sentence that justified the funeral. It is not glamorous. It is how Funnel Geometry remains possible after a redesign.

The assignment people find bruising

Students sometimes write that week two assumed more warehouse comfort than the public syllabus admitted. That is fair. You cannot defend a name you cannot query. We would rather bruise the first assignment than let a decorative catalogue pass as finished work. If SQL is not your daily tool, block extra time before you sit that week, or bring an engineer as a silent partner — not as a ghost writer of the nouns.

For the full sequence, see the Product Signal Atelier syllabus.