12 March 2026
Naming events that survive a reorg
The most expensive event in an app is the one named after a pixel that design is about to move. Tool Mapbase students arrive with lists full of Home_Tapped and Tab2_Viewed. Those names are honest about the interface and dishonest about the product.
A reorg, in this house, does not mean a new CEO. It means the tab bar splits, the heart icon becomes a bookmark, or onboarding loses a screen that used to fire onboarding_step_3. The instrumentation still compiles. The funnel becomes a ghost story.
Prefer intent over control
Name the decision a person could explain to a friend. item_saved survives a visual refresh. heart_tapped does not. If two controls can complete the same decision — a swipe and a button — they should share an event and differ by a property such as method, not fork into two histories that nobody will join later.
Screen names belong as properties when you truly need them for QA. They should not be the noun. We have watched a “Home” event survive three redesigns in which Home was no longer a place, only a word in a spreadsheet.
Give every event an owner
During the Event Taxonomy Atelier we refuse ownerless rows. Product owns intent events. Platform may own crash and performance emissions, which should not sit in the same table as checkout. When a name is contested, the owner writes a sentence: this fires when the server confirms the order, not when the button is pressed. That sentence is the spec. The SDK call is an implementation detail.
What we delete
Duplicate verbs for the same object. Client-side and server-side purchases both kept “for safety”. Interaction catch-alls with a type property that has grown a small novel. Deletion is a release. Document the date. Downstream dashboards will break; that is preferable to a silent fork.
If your company is about to reshuffle navigation, freeze new event names for a fortnight and spend the time mapping old names to intent. The mapping table is dull. It is also the only artefact that still makes sense in six months.