Cartographers do not name a river twice for the pleasure of it. Product teams do. In App Analytics this shows up as “Purchase”, “purchase_made”, and “ecom_success” living side by side, each loved by a different year of the company.
A usable name is boring. Object, action, tense agreed in advance. “checkout_started” and “checkout_completed” will never win a branding workshop. They will, however, tell a contractor on a Tuesday which fire is which. If your events sound like campaign slogans, you have already lost the dictionary.
Version in the open
When the meaning of a property changes, do not overwrite history and hope. Mint a sibling, alias the old name, write a retirement date. Week 6 of Instrumentation Studio is largely this social labour. Engineers can ship an alias in an afternoon. Organisations take a quarter to stop using the ghost.
I am milder than Celia on screen names. I would rather a slightly ugly, stable token than a poetic rename every time design moves a button. Maps that chase the latest UI become unreadable the moment the UI is archived.
What not to put on the map
Free-text, raw messages, and anything that could be a person in disguise. Cardinality is not a theoretical worry; it is how your App Analytics bill and your query times become a morality play. If you need a payload for debugging, keep it in logs with a tighter retention, not in the product ledger the board can screenshot.
Name as if the next hire is tired and slightly late. That person is you, in six months.