Data taxonomy

Often times people are aware of the importance of collecting data but struggle with documenting and communicating their needs to development teams. Here’s two simple things for tackling exactly that problem:

1. A simple spreadsheet that gets you off the ground documenting what needs to be collected: Data taxonomy spreadsheet.
2. A snippet for your future analytics helper file, which dictates what data gets send and where. It makes it easy for anybody to a) keep tabs on implementation (“is it done already?”) and b) make changes without development dependencies (no more “can you send this attribute to system X as well?”:

    attribute('my favorite attribute', {
           mytool: true,
           yourtool: false
    })

Note: Naturally, you need to define and implement the actual tracking of events and attributes. For doing this a good place to start is e.g. Segment’s analytics.js.