The benefits of creating your own tracking plan.

Knowing the pipes that flow data from your product to you and your team can make a big difference.

The first time my manager said to me that we should “track the app” I got confused. It was my second month as a Product Owner in a big retailer from Brazil and pretty much everything “Product” related was still pretty new to me. However, one of the things that I didn’t have absolutely A CLUE of what it meant was the so-called activity of “Tracking the App”. I think that back then App tracking was pretty new to everybody else in Brazil too. In my mind, apps are born with this thing on, right? Isn’t like that?

We ended up getting a third-party to help out with the tracking plan, the package actually included not only the apps but all products. When they finished their part, I received a spreadsheet that contained things like “events”, “parameters”, “user properties” that were triggered by the user when doing actions on the app. I didn’t know what those things were. I also didn’t know how the data would flow from the app to the databases and all. “Well, I don’t need to know what it is, I just need to implement it, I’m the PO right?”. Wrong, but I only discovered that later.

My job was to take that spreadsheet and turn it into code. I created the…