How many things should we actually track?
Fewer than you think — around 30 distinct events is where most teams start to struggle. Past that, analysts lose days choosing between near-duplicates like "subscription created" and "subscription submitted", documentation stops being maintainable, and monitoring becomes noise nobody acts on.
The grandmother version
You can label every single jar in the pantry. Three hundred labels, all accurate.
Then you need the cinnamon, and you read four hundred labels to find it.
Label the shelves instead — baking, tins, spices — and put the detail on the jar itself. Now finding things is fast, and adding a new jar doesn't mean a new shelf.
What goes wrong past thirty
Three things, all organisational rather than technical. Analysts open the tool and find four plausible events for the same thing, then spend days working out which is real. Documentation for 30+ events needs dedicated process and tooling, so in practice it decays. And monitoring generates alerts on so many events that nobody chases any of them.
Forty or fifty can work. Past that, these problems are reliable.
Model nouns and verbs, not clicks
Pick 3–7 entities — the nouns of your product: account, board, asset, subscription. Then activities, which are past-tense verbs marking progress: Board Created, Asset Deleted, Subscription Renewed.
Everything else becomes a property — board_template_used, asset_type, plan_tier — adding dimensions without inventing events. This is where schemas stay small.
Log accomplishments, not pixels
"Asset Created" tells you something happened that mattered. "Clicked Sticker Tool" tells you a pixel was touched.
For granular interaction, use one catch-all — interaction clicked, with properties — and promote something to a formal event only when it has earned it by being asked about repeatedly. One team owns the schema.
The short version
A lean schema that people trust beats a complete one that nobody can navigate.
If you already have 150 events, don't try to document your way out. Define the 20 that matter, mark the rest as legacy, and stop adding.
Event model and definitions are part of The Measurement Spec — €900.
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