9 April 2026 · naming
Why event names rot
A name starts as a ticket. Six months later it is a museum label. The packet still fires. Nobody can say what a person actually did.
In Event Taxonomy Studio we ask people to read an event as a spoken sentence. If the sentence needs a slide, the name is already compost. “Opened lesson after a cold start on iOS” will outlive “engagement_start.” The first one is slightly ugly. Ugliness resists being reused as a slogan.
Name the surface, not the colour of the button
Buttons move. Surfaces persist. A lesson screen, a paywall, a store listing, a notification shade — these are places a person can still recognise after a rebrand. Encoding hex values, component library names, or sprint nicknames into events is how you guarantee a rewrite.
Properties should finish the sentence, not start a second one. “plan_type” belongs on a purchase event. “is_power_user” belongs nowhere; it is a segment you compute later, and computing it at send-time freezes a definition you will regret.
Version with a date, not a v2
When meaning changes, cut a new event and put an expiry on the old one. “v2” in a name tells you only that an argument happened. A sunset date in the contract tells you when the old packet may be ignored. Cohort Craft week four is mostly this paperwork.
Eighteen months is long enough for one redesign, one privacy review, and one staff change. If your names cannot survive that, they were tickets. Read cohort windows that lie next, or sit Cohort Craft.