Writing an event dictionary that survives a reorg

An event dictionary fails when it is a naming museum. Names drift; owners leave. The entries that survive a reorganisation list a named role (not a person alone), the reports that depend on the event, and the change rule that must fire before a property is renamed.

We ask clients to attach one acceptance check per critical event—something a release engineer can run in staging, such as “purchase_completed appears with amount and currency within five minutes of a test checkout.” Without that check, the dictionary is literature.

Keep the document short enough that product managers will open it. Long taxonomies invite shadow spreadsheets. Prefer one dictionary per product area over a company-wide encyclopedia no one maintains.

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