“Week six forced us to watch sessions of people who never hit our ‘activated’ event. Half of them had already done the job our product claims to do. We changed the event. Retention looked worse for a month. Then it meant something.”
Flagship programme
Retention Cartography
Eight weeks to stop treating “users came back” as a single number. You will leave with a map of who returns, after what, and a recommendation you can defend in a budget meeting.
What you actually do
Each week has a lecture (ninety minutes, recorded), a worksheet against your own product, and a written critique from the studio. We meet live on Thursdays. If you miss two lives without notice, we stop marking; the map only works if it is yours.
Tools are welcome and never required. Bring Amplitude, Mixpanel, PostHog, BigQuery, or a CSV you exported in a panic. The assignments are tool-agnostic on purpose.
You should leave able to
- Separate activation from first-session novelty
- Choose a cohort window that matches billing reality
- Spot resurrection that looks like growth
- Write a one-page retention brief
- Kill a north-star that cannot be moved by product
- Explain a curve to someone who does not like charts
Modules
The eight sheets of the map
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01 · The lie of the overall curve
Why blended retention hides a dying new-user cohort behind a loyal core. You redraw last quarter with the core removed.
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02 · Activation as a cliff, not a badge
We pick one activation event and attack it. If it is “signed_up”, you will be asked to start again.
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03 · Windows that match money
Subscription, usage, and marketplace apps need different clocks. You document yours so the chart stops arguing with finance.
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04 · Event hygiene for retention questions
A short, ruthless pass over the events that feed the map. We do not rebuild your entire taxonomy here — that is Event Schema Architecture.
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05 · Resurrection, coupons, and seasonality
The homework this week is heavy. Several alumni have said it collided with a release; plan for it.
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06 · Qualitative overlay
Ten support tickets and five session recordings against the worst cell on your grid. Numbers without scenes are decoration.
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07 · The decision brief
One page. A change you recommend, the cohort it should move, the time you will wait, and the kill criteria.
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08 · Defence
Live critique with two other participants acting as a sceptical commercial partner. No slides over six.
Tutor
Dr Anwen Pryce
Anwen founded the studio after eight years leading product analytics at a UK payments company that outgrew its own dashboards. She still marks every Retention Cartography brief herself. Her patience for vanity north-stars is limited; her patience for messy warehouses is not.
Fee (informational)
What the seat includes
£1,480 per person for the public autumn and spring cohorts. That covers lectures, worksheets, Thursday live rooms, and two rounds of written critique on the final brief. It does not include travel to Balcherry, vendor licences, or a private warehouse review. We do not take payment on this site; enrolment is arranged by email after a short fit conversation.
Questions we actually get
Do I need SQL?
Enough to select a cohort and count events. If you cannot yet join two tables, come to Event Schema Architecture first or bring an analyst as a pair. We will not teach SELECT from scratch in week one.
Is this useful for games or ads-driven apps?
Only at the edges. We do not cover live-ops economies, battle-pass maths, or ad-network attribution. If your app is primarily an advertising surface, this programme will leave those pipelines untouched — that is a real limitation, not a humblebrag.
What if my tracking is a mess?
Good. Week four is built for that. If there is literally no event stream, wait until you have thirty days of something, even if it is ugly.
Can my whole team sit in?
Public seats are individual. For a team of four or more, the Observatory arrangement on the fees page is the honest route.
From recent briefs
Anwen’s notes on my brief were shorter than I wanted and more precise than our agency’s forty-page deck. I still think the live defence is too performative for introverts, but I would sit it again.
Reserve a conversation
Tell us which product you would bring. We reply within two working days.