Tracking Plan Quick Start Guide
Dec 13, 2023
Tracking Plan Quick Starter
Now you are ready to make tracking easy and right for your team. You first move is to grab a handy tool!
To begin with the good old sheets, you can download a simple Google Sheet template here.
If your teams are comfortable with Figma, this Figma extension allows you to annotate event tracking plan on design files.
How to use a Tracking Plan
Unfortunately, the magic doesn’t happen the moment you download the spreadsheet. It will not solve the problem if your team doesn’t use it.
The good news is, it only takes a little more step: to convey the next steps beyond this spreadsheet with your team:
Assign Clear Next Steps for Each Role: Each team member should know their next step in the tracking process.
The exact task for each role should be depending on your team’s culture. Here is what we do as a reference:Plan: Planner(often the PM) will take some minutes to map out what to track in Figma, or in the tracking plan. The status is now
📝 In planning.Curation: The team, especially the engineers, spend 10 minutes reviewing and adjusting tracking details. Mark status as
🧑💻 Ready for dev.Implementation: With detailed requirements in hand, engineers go implement code. Mark status as
🛠 Implemented.Validation: After the code shipped to users, a validator(PM, eng, or data) will check the trackers trigger right and data looks right. Mark as
✅ Ready to use.Updates: Sometimes things changes, and tracking needs updates. Mark status as
⛔️ Update needed.
Team Reviews: Regularly review the plan as a team to make sure everyone understands and follows it.
The review usually takes 15-30 minutes. It finds outdated events and tracks debts. We usually do this every month to quarter, depending on how many tracking were changed.
More Resources about Tracking Plans
Tracking plans vary depending on the project's needs. Here are a few other tracking plans resources:
Amplitude: Create a tracking plan
Segment: What is a tracking plan?
Mixpanel: Create A Tracking Plan
AVO: What is a Tracking Plan?
I also recommend this article: Why most analytics efforts fail
Conclusion
A tracking plan is not just a document; it’s a roadmap for successful, organized data tracking in your product. By noticing this six signs and introducing a tracking plan early, you can save huge for your team by move fast with aligned taxonomy and reliable data.
Next time a new UI released, you will plan detail from Figma design, adjust tracking plan with engineers, look up this detail in one place, put together a chart, share the result and proceed confidently without any delays.
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