Ask HN: What tools and templates do you use to document your Product Analytics?

1 points by Flammy 4 years ago | 2 comments

Like many orgs, we try to keep on top of tagging important user actions with our analytics tool of choice.

However, we're trying to be more mature in how we document our Product Analytics so that we have a history of changing analytics event names, event properties, weaved in with product history of changes. This could include documenting this like the fact we renamed a CTA, combined two CTAs into one, or changed the functionality for a modal.

The goal is to allow a new team member to dive into analytics without getting lost or having to ask multiple other team members "what does X event mean?" or "Are we really missing Y event between X and Z dates?"

I imagine this has to be a problem others have run into, and hopefully solved. I'm curious to hear your solutions. If you have a template you've used to track this, please share. If there is a paid product out there that does this, let me know!

Thanks HN.

learningmore 4 years ago |

This may seem simplistic and very centrally controlled…but a large spreadsheet showing the taxonomy of an app, was very helpful.

Our team could “peek” into the taxonomy for other team’s apps. This helped engineers on our team get a feel for how other teams understood events. (How did they describe “action”, category, etc?)

One key thing that helped was having an initiative to help explain why we track, with a team that volunteered to present and explain how best to implement it.

This was at a Fortune 500 company, with lots of legacy software, so perhaps a smaller team with a younger app could get by with just a taxonomy and not a evangelistic analytics team.

Good luck!

Flammy 4 years ago | |

Thanks for the reply, I appreciate it.