Validating your Tracking plan

The hardest thing about creating a tracking plan is well... everything :)

You need to fill these sheets that allow you to plan what properties to add and when to trigger the event but you need to remember the following points

1. You need to make sure it will hold up for the long run: The last thing you want is to do all this work and that in a few months time it will be obsolete
2. Data Governance at it's core: Make sure to build in a way that it will be manageable, clear and scalable. This how to build those objects in a way that you can always add additional context when you need it without breaking everything. Also make sure people understand it
3. Focus on 5-10 events. You don't need more then that, it will get messy and fast
4. The last step that a lot of companies skip is validation. How do I make sure that the data is not just sent but that it's also usable.

For that I've created a guide you can try to follow that will turn this:

Into These:

Following my Starting with why post I wanted to give you a new perspective on sending events that will help you understand more.

We need as product managers to start looking at events as actions and understand why the users did that action and give context to each event rather then just sending vanity events that allow me to just see a number.

Working with clients allows me to see the difference it makes once you start asking those more complex questions. Suddenly you can uncover the true reason why users are doing or not doing what you want them to do in your product.

Let’s take an example for Uber. Instead of tracking map scrolls and zooms (vanity metric) I can send a “selected pickup” event with a property of select method and send as a list what they used to get to the pickup location. Did they search then zoom, did they scroll then tap? If i add this under my main event suddenly I can create breakdowns allowing me to really tap into the user actions.

So let's get to it:

1. Create a test project
2. Set a service account user to authenticate
3. Use the “builder” to easily create the structure you need for an event (do that within the documentation UI - https://developer.mixpanel.com/reference/import-events)
4. Trigger events and start playing with the UI. It will be a lot easier before the dev efforts to see if you're able to answer all the questions you trying to ask.