11 June 2026
Event names that survive a rebrand
A campaign can rename a screen in a week. A warehouse cannot. The catalogue has to be written for the second of those clocks.
We keep meeting United Kingdom teams whose most important event is still called something like Signup_v3_final2. Nobody in the room can say which product surface it refers to. The name was honest for a sprint. It is now a debt instrument: every new hire pays interest in Slack threads.
In Event Taxonomy Studio we ask students to split every name into an object and a verb before they are allowed a marketing noun. Objects are durable: account, invoice, workout, article, order. Verbs are fewer than people think: viewed, started, completed, failed, cancelled. Wrappers — “Spring Glow launch”, “new onboarding” — belong in properties, or in a changelog, not in the event’s spine.
Retirement is a feature
A catalogue without a retirement rule is a landfill. We write the date a name will stop being emitted, the app versions that still fire it, and the successor event. If you cannot name the successor, you are not ready to kill the old one; you are only tired of seeing it.
Rebrands fail analytics programmes when someone “just updates the display name” in the vendor UI and leaves the underlying token alone. That is fine for a month. Then a second rebrand arrives, and the UI name and the token have diverged twice. Finance compares two quarters that are no longer the same sentence.
What we do in the room
Students bring a raw export, not a slide. We read twenty event names aloud. If two people gloss a name differently, it is rewritten that afternoon or it is marked as blocked. Blocked is an honourable state. It is more honest than a blended “engagement” event that means five objects at once.
If you want the longer sitting, The Cohort Atlas spends two modules on this before anyone is allowed to draw retention. The journal will not replace that table.