Journal · 16 February 2026

Event taxonomies for product teams

A taxonomy is not a spreadsheet with two hundred rows. It is the smallest set of sentences a product organisation can share without a translator in the room. App Analytics stacks fail when the taxonomy is treated as an engineering chore and the PM only meets it at quarterly review.

We ask three people to own it: someone who ships the client, someone who reads the charts, and someone who can kill a name. If any chair is empty, aliases breed. Android will call it PurchaseBegin and iOS will call it checkout_tapped, and six months later finance will ask a question nobody can answer twice the same way.

How to hold the list

Group by user jobs, not by screens. Screens move. Jobs (pay, save, listen, book) persist. Each event gets a stem, a version when meaning changes, a property whitelist, and a retirement date if it is experimental. That is the whole ritual. Tools can generate prettier diagrams; they cannot appoint the killer.

Bring the list to Event Grammar if you want the worksheets, or to Taxonomy Atelier if you want a live red pen. Do not wait for a vendor migration to start naming things; migrations multiply whatever dialect you already have.

A note on completeness

Completeness is a trap. Instrument the jobs that change a decision this quarter. Leave a documented hole rather than a ghost event that fires on prefetch. Holes can be filled. Ghosts contaminate funnels for years.