Journal · 2025-11-22
When event names block adoption work
How messy tracking catalogs quietly sabotage feature usage reports—and what to clean first.
Adoption assessments stall when the same user action appears under three event names from three release eras. Analysts then spend the week reconciling strings instead of reading behavior.
Clean collisions before you clean omissions. Two names for one action corrupt every reach calculation. Missing events can be noted; colliding events invent false growth.
Deprecate with a date, not a hope. Leave the old event in the catalog marked retired, and stop teaching new engineers to fire it. Silence without a label invites resurrection.
Write a short glossary that product, success, and engineering can all open. If “invite_sent” means something different to marketing than to product, your feature usage report will argue with itself.
Treat the catalog review as maintenance, not a heroic rewrite. A two-week annotation pass every few quarters keeps adoption briefings honest without freezing the roadmap.