2 February 2026 · Isolde Venn
Event names that survive a reorg
Product companies in the United Kingdom reorganise with the seasons. The event grid does not. That mismatch is how a perfectly sincere taxonomy becomes folklore. Squad_checkout_v2 is not a behaviour. It is a seating plan that expired.
The Survey Grid rule is dull on purpose: the name is a verb a person did, optionally with an object, never with an org chart. Saved_trip, listed_sku, started_session only if you can defend session as a human act (usually you cannot). Properties may carry surface, plan, and experiment. The event name itself must still make sense when the “Growth Pod” is now called “Activation Circle” and reports to a different director.
Students in Grid Instrumentation spend a week reading their own names aloud to a designer. Names that need a preface — “that’s the thing the payments squad fires after the sheet dismisses” — fail. Names that a new joiner could find in six months without Slack archaeology pass. The test is not elegance. It is whether the grid still surveys the same ground after the all-hands.
There is a cost. You will have fewer events, and some engineers will miss the convenience of prefixing by repo. Prefixes belong in source, not in the plot the board is asked to believe. App Analytics is a public language inside the company. It should be allowed to outlive the tribe that first typed it.