Why tracking everything in analytics is actually making you dumber

Original: Making Smart Tradeoffs in Analytics: A Slack Tracking Plan Journey

May 29, 2025

18 min read

Framework

Intermediate

Business Understanding

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Making Smart Tradeoffs in Analytics: A Slack Tracking Plan Journey

Summary

This article explores the concepts and techniques for analyzing user activation and onboarding, including measuring time-to-value, identifying 'aha moments', and optimizing the user experience to drive faster activation and higher engagement.

Who This Is For

Product Analysts

Product Managers

Analytics Engineers

Key Takeaways

Learn why the 'track everything' approach creates analytics debt and makes decision-making harder
Apply the Core Entity Test to identify what actually matters for your product analytics
Use Slack as a real-world example to see how strategic event selection works in practice
Understand how fewer, well-designed events can provide better insights than hundreds of scattered data points
Implement a framework for making smart tradeoffs between comprehensive tracking and actionable analytics

Tools & Technologies

Slack Analytics platforms (general) Event tracking systems D3L framework

Topics Covered

user-onboarding activation-metrics time-to-value aha-moment

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