Stories

What changed after the names were written down

These are not ratings. They are remarks from people who sat in the workshops or walked a staging build with us. One of them wished we had been blunter. That belongs here too.

We had 186 event names and no agreement on what “checkout” included. Aisha’s table cut that to 41 actions with owners. The first week of the dictionary was slower than adding tracker calls ourselves; after the iOS handoff, the arguments in stand-up actually stopped.

Hana Idris, Product lead, grocery app · Event Schema Planning

The audit found three different spellings of the same screen view and a property that stored the student’s full matric number. I wish they had been blunter in the readout about how long we had been reporting a funnel that no longer matched Android. The keep-rename-retire sheet is what we still use.

Marcus Ong, Analytics manager, campus services · Tracking Plan Audit

Wei Liang walked the staging build with the plan version we claimed to have shipped. Payment_method_selected was firing on page load, not on choice. That is a dull finding and it saved us from presenting a fake drop-off to the board.

Siti Zahra, Engineering manager, ticket sales · Instrumentation Review

The banned-word list (click, success, done) felt petty until we tried to name the locker flow without them. We left with twelve events for one feature. I wanted a full-app dictionary the same afternoon; they would not write one from a half-day, which I respect and found annoying.

Daniel Pereira, Squad lead, logistics · Naming Workshop

Event Schema Planning · Regional grocery delivery, based in Petaling Jaya

A checkout with four names

The product had grown by squad. Payments named events after the processor. Fulfilment named events after the rider status. Growth named events after the banner that happened to sit on the screen that week. Finance asked for a weekly conversion number and received four.

We spent the first workshop walking the order path on a test phone, writing the person’s action on paper before anyone opened the tracker. Place order, choose slot, pay, wait for rider. Those four actions became the spine. Processor codes, rider statuses, and banner ids moved into properties with allowed values.

The handoff took longer than the workshops because iOS and Android had different moments for “pay.” We wrote two trigger notes under one event name. The quarter after delivery, the grocery team compared weeks without a mapping spreadsheet. They still argue about slot naming. They no longer argue about whether checkout happened.

Tracking Plan Audit · Membership app for a Klang Valley campus group

The funnel that rose after a rename

signup_completed jumped in March. The campus analytics manager brought us the export, not a theory. We lined names against screenshots from the December build and the March build.

In December the event fired after email verification. In March verification was removed and the same string fired when the account row was inserted. The chart was honest about the string and dishonest about the membership.

The audit recommended a new name for account creation, a retirement date for the old string, and a user property for verification state when that feature returned. They kept the old name for one more release, which we advised against. Dual-fire for fourteen days would have been cheaper than the board explanation that followed.