Journal · 12 May 2026
Naming events that survive a rebrand
The product will be called something else by Thursday. The behaviour will not. App Analytics fails when the stream is loyal to the brand team’s nouns.
I still see event names like aurora_started_glow_checkout from a campaign that lasted six weeks in 2022. The campaign is gone. The name is load-bearing. Every new analyst learns a folk etymology instead of a verb and an object.
Name the action, not the costume
A workable pattern is a present-tense verb and a durable object: checkout_started, lesson_completed, payout_requested. Put the costume in a property if you must: campaign_code, surface, copy_variant. Properties can be abandoned. Event names become joins, dashboards, and muscle memory.
When a United Kingdom retailer we taught renamed a loyalty tier, they had instrumented gold_unlocked. Gold became “Heritage”. The warehouse spent a quarter aliasing. The object was always loyalty_tier_reached; the tier value belonged in a field with a documented enum.
Keep a synonym graveyard
Rebrands spawn polite duplicates. Someone adds heritage_unlocked “just for the new app” and leaves the old event firing from a webview. Your freeze protocol should list retired names and the date they must go silent. Silence is a release task, not a wiki hope.
What we do in Signal Architecture
Week one is a synonym hunt out loud. It is socially awkward and faster than a migration. If you want the exercise as a sitting rather than an essay, the syllabus is on the programme page.