Name the verb the human performed, not the campaign that paid for the install, and not the seasonal illustration behind the button. lesson_completed will still be true when the lesson is called a “spark,” a “mission,” or whatever the agency sold in March. spark_tapped will be a museum label by June.
We ask students to read their event list aloud in a room. If a designer laughs, the name is probably a screen. If an engineer asks which platform you mean, the name has already split. If a marketer says “but that’s the hero moment,” you are hearing a slide, not a schema.
Keep a quiet table for scenery
Screen views are not immoral. They are scenery. Put them in a separate stream with a prefix the weekly readout is forbidden to use. The moment HomeViewed sits next to paid_or_renewed in the same explorer, someone will build a funnel that treats wallpaper as intent.
Properties should describe the verb: duration, item identity, success or failure, platform. They should not describe the billboard that sat above the verb. Acquisition context joins later, in a warehouse, where it can be wrong without rewriting the product’s memory.
Version the meaning, not the string
When you must change what an event means — first value moves from “opened the editor” to “exported a file” — do not reuse the old name and hope the dates save you. Mint a new verb, document the overlap week, and retire the old one on a dated line in the Atlas. History that pretends two meanings are one meaning is how board slides become folklore.
A rebrand is a coat of paint. If your taxonomy needs a migration because the paint changed, the taxonomy was already a brochure. In the studio we treat that as a defect you can still fix, provided someone can still ship events this quarter.