{% quickstart-meta audience="For data engineers, implementation leads, and governance owners" time="15 min" level="intermediate" /%}

This quickstart is for data governance owners, data engineers, and implementation leads. Follow these steps to create a tracking plan, validate your event data, and organize your team's instrumentation work.

{% outcomes %}
{% outcome icon="ClipboardList" title="A tracking plan" href="/docs/data/create-tracking-plan" %}
Defines every event and property your product sends to Amplitude.
{% /outcome %}
{% outcome icon="ShieldCheck" title="Validation rules" href="/docs/data/validate-events" %}
Flag unexpected or malformed events before they reach your charts.
{% /outcome %}
{% outcome icon="Database" title="A data catalog" href="/docs/data/amplitude-data-get-started" %}
Browse and document every event and property flowing into your Amplitude project.
{% /outcome %}
{% /outcomes %}

{% prerequisites %}
{% prerequisite %}
An Amplitude account with access to Amplitude Data — go to [Create a new account](/docs/get-started/create-a-new-account) if you don't have one.
{% /prerequisite %}
{% prerequisite %}
An Admin or Manager role in your organization (required to create and publish tracking plans).
{% /prerequisite %}
{% prerequisite %}
Alignment with your product and engineering teams on what to track — go to [Plan your implementation](/docs/get-started/plan-your-implementation) to work through those decisions first.
{% /prerequisite %}
{% /prerequisites %}

{% callout type="note" %}
Starting from scratch? Go to [Instrumentation prework](/docs/get-started/instrumentation-prework) to build alignment on taxonomy, user identity, and naming conventions before you create your tracking plan.
{% /callout %}

{% steps %}

{% step eyebrow="Create" title="Build a tracking plan" %}
A tracking plan is a single source of truth that defines every event and property your product sends to Amplitude. It gives engineers a spec to implement against, and gives analysts confidence in the data they query.

Go to [Amplitude Data](/docs/data/amplitude-data-get-started) and open the _Tracking Plan_ tab. Create a new plan and [add your events](/docs/data/create-tracking-plan). Start with the five to ten actions most critical to your product's success, such as sign-up, activation, and conversion events. For each event, define its required properties and their expected types.

Publish the plan so it's visible to your engineering and product teams.
{% /step %}

{% step eyebrow="Validate" title="Check incoming events" %}
After engineering instruments against your plan, use [event validation](/docs/data/validate-events) to check that real events match your spec. Amplitude Data flags events with missing required properties, unexpected property types, or names that don't match your plan.

Open the _Observe_ tab in Amplitude Data to see a live stream of incoming events alongside any validation warnings. Resolve issues by updating the tracking plan, fixing the instrumentation, or both. The resolution workflow keeps a record of what changed and why.
{% /step %}

{% step eyebrow="Organize" title="Set your team's workflow" %}
A clean tracking plan only stays clean if everyone follows the same process. Go to [Implementation team organization](/docs/get-started/implementation-team-organization) for a recommended workflow that covers who owns the tracking plan, how engineers request changes, and how to handle schema evolution over time.

Define your team's review process before implementation starts, so that new events go through the tracking plan before they reach production.
{% /step %}

{% /steps %}

## Next steps

{% card-grid %}
{% card title="Enforce naming conventions" description="Use Amplitude Data's linting rules to block events that don't follow your taxonomy before they reach production." href="/docs/data/amplitude-data-get-started" icon="🛡️" /%}
{% card title="Connect your data sources" description="Connect third-party sources, CDPs, and warehouses to your Amplitude project." href="/docs/data/amplitude-data-get-started" icon="🔌" /%}
{% /card-grid %}