"Track everything" buried the one thing that mattered

"Track everything" buried the one thing that mattered

A fintech app had 340 custom events firing. The team was proud of it. Then a product manager asked a simple question: how many users finished onboarding? Nobody could answer cleanly.

The clue showed up in the events report. Eleven different events all roughly meant "signup complete," fired by different teams across two years. Each told a slightly different story, so the funnel was un-trustable.

We deleted 280 events and defined nine canonical ones with a naming convention. Onboarding completion, suddenly measurable, came in at 38% — far below the 61% leadership had assumed from a vanity event.

That correction reshaped the next quarter's roadmap. Verified onboarding rose from 38% to 52% once the real drop-off was visible.

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Lesson: "track everything" produces noise, not insight. A small set of trustworthy events beats a wall of ambiguous ones every time.