Most tracking plans are photo albums of an interface. Someone named clicked_green_cta in a year when the call to action was green. Two redesigns later the button is a text link and the event still fires, or it does not, and nobody can reconstruct the original intent without Slack archaeology.
App Analytics only compounds the problem: vendors make it cheap to add a name and expensive to admit the old one was a souvenir. In the Bearley studio we start with a sentence a future colleague could understand with the UI turned off.
Write the job, then steal a verb
The sentence has a person, a job, and a finish line. “A borrower finishes uploading the documents required for an affordability check” is a job. “User taps Continue on screen 3” is a layout. If your event name can be reverse-engineered into the first sentence, it will survive a rebrand. If it can only be reverse-engineered into the second, it will not.
We favour object–action pairs: document_pack_submitted, affordability_check_started. We forbid colour, component, and marketing campaign names inside the event itself. Campaigns belong in properties, and even then only if you will still know what they meant in eighteen months.
The oral tradition is the real schema
When two teams use the same event with different stories, you do not have a taxonomy. You have folklore. The cure is not a longer Confluence page. It is a short glossary that lists the job, the finish line, and one example of what does not count. Event Cartography spends a week on the “does not count” column because that is where retries, auto-saves, and preview states hide.
If engineering cannot implement the “does not count” rule without a meeting, the name is still too close to the glass.
Rename as a project, not as a hobby
Renaming in place is how histories die. Dual-write the new name, keep the old one as a deprecated alias with an owner and a sunset date, and put the sunset in a calendar that a human actually sees. Teams that skip the alias period always discover, in a board pack, that a funnel silently halved.
This is slower than a Friday cleanup. It is the only speed that does not insult the people who will inherit the map. If you want the sitting that practises this on a live slice, start with Event Cartography.