Product Analytics Instrumentation

Core Workflow

1. Define the product decision, user journey, and metric questions before naming events.
2. Map the journey: acquisition, onboarding, activation, core loop, conversion, retention, expansion, referral, failure, and support.
3. Design event taxonomy with consistent names, required properties, optional properties, identity rules, timestamps, source, and versioning.
4. Separate product analytics events from technical observability signals, while preserving useful joins between them.
5. Plan implementation and QA: trigger conditions, deduplication, consent, privacy, test users, environments, and validation queries.
6. Define dashboard and analysis use cases before instrumenting extra data.
7. Maintain the taxonomy: ownership, change review, deprecation, documentation, and data quality checks.

Freshness Rule

Verify current analytics, privacy, SDK, consent, and observability documentation before giving platform-specific advice for GA4, Firebase, Amplitude, Segment, PostHog, Mixpanel, OpenTelemetry, data warehouses, or mobile/game SDKs.

Instrumentation Principles