Journal · 12 March 2026
Marketing will rename the home screen. Design will split a checkout into two steps. Neither change should force you to rewrite history in the warehouse. An event dictionary that is tied to pixels and campaign names will rot the moment the brand film ships. A dictionary tied to verbs and objects can be versioned like a statute.
We keep physical cards in Logan for this reason. Each card holds a name that can be spoken in a standup: “completed first funded transfer,” not “WalletHome_CTA_v3.” The owner is a person, not a Slack channel. Properties are few and enumerated. If someone wants to add a free-text field for “source,” the card is refused until the list of allowed sources is closed. Open strings are how five spellings of Instagram enter a funnel.
Version dates matter more than “final.” When checkout splits, we do not rename the old event to match the new screen. We add a sibling, mark the old card as retired on a date, and keep both in the catalogue so last year’s cohort still reads. Students in Event Taxonomy Architecture spend an entire seminar arguing about a single checkout event. The argument is the work.
Identity belongs on the card, not as an afterthought. Does this event fire before login? After? On a shared tablet? If the answer is “sometimes,” the event is not ready. The identity cache — the other half of our name — is a set of drawers, not a hope that the SDK will stitch lives together politely.
A rebrand then becomes a mapping exercise rather than a crisis. The website can say “Spark” while the dictionary still says “transfer.” Finance can still compare Q2 to Q2. The only teams who suffer are those who named events after the campaign that paid for the billboard.
If you want the workbook without the nine-week room, Signal Desk ships the cards as a bound set. If you want the argument live, the flagship programme still begins with an inventory you would rather not show anyone.