Event names that survive a reorg | Data Mapgrid Journal

The first casualty of a new Head of Product is the event dictionary. Here is the naming discipline we teach in Event Schema Architecture, written so you can steal it without the seat.

A tracking plan dies in committee language. Someone wants the event to describe a campaign. Someone else wants it to describe a screen. Engineering wants it to match a function name. Six months later you have `hero_cta_tapped`, `homepage_click`, and `growth_experiment_3_convert`, all firing for the same human movement. App Analytics then becomes archaeology.

We name places, not posters. The pattern is object, then action, in boring English: `checkout_started`, `invoice_exported`, `symptom_logged`. The object is a thing in the product’s world, not a React component. The action is a verb the user (or the system) completed, not a hope.

Ban the synonyms

Pick one verb for completion and put the others on a wall of shame. If `submitted` is canonical, then `sent`, `completed`, `finished`, and `success` are illegal in new events. Design will still ship a new button. That is a property (`surface`, `entry_point`), not a new town on the map. In class we keep a one-page synonym ban; teams that skip it are rewriting history by November.

Properties are weather

A property may describe context: plan tier, platform, experiment id. It may not smuggle a second event. `button_name` is usually a smell. If you need to know which control was used, you probably wanted a different object. The exception is genuinely identical acts — exporting the same invoice from list or detail — and even then the object stays `invoice` and the action stays `exported`.

Version, do not haunt

When a name is wrong, deprecate it with a date and a successor. Dual-write for a documented window. Do not leave `checkout_started_v2` forever; that is how ghosts accumulate. A reorg will invent v3 because nobody can find the note in Confluence. Put the deprecation in the dictionary the same way you put it in git: owner, date, replacement.

If this is the layer you are missing, the Atlas calls it ground. The rest of the map cannot be honest until the names are dull. Event Schema Architecture is the guided version; the Analytics Atlas page shows where it sits against retention and experiments.