“The event naming workshop on day two made our existing schema look theatrical. We had seventeen verbs for the same checkout. Painful. Also the first time I trusted a funnel.”
Vol. VII — App Analytics from Balcherry
The grid beneath your product.
Most instrumentation is a filing cabinet. Events pile up, dashboards multiply, and nobody can say whether week-four retention moved because of the new onboarding or because a coupon expired. Data Mapgrid treats App Analytics as a drawing problem: what belongs on the map, what is noise, and which lines actually describe a journey.
We run small programmes for product managers, analysts, and founders who already have a tracking plan and still cannot defend a decision with it. The work is slow on purpose. You leave with a taxonomy you can maintain, not a screenshot of someone else’s Mixpanel.
Heard in critique
Not every map is flattering.
Alumni write about specific modules. We keep the mixed notes as well as the kind ones.
Useful, though the homework load in week five collided with our release. I still use the cohort window worksheet every Monday.
★★★★☆
The Funnel Geometry lectures refused to treat drop-off as a morality play. That alone was worth the train from Bristol.
Open programmes
Four maps. One flagship.
Retention Cartography
Draw retention as a landscape: activation cliffs, resurrection pockets, and the quiet plateau that finance keeps calling “healthy.”
Syllabus and dates
Event Schema Architecture
A working taxonomy for product, data, and engineering — versioned, boring on purpose, and resilient to the next reorg.
Ask for the next seatHow the studio teaches
Paper first. Tools second.
We are not a vendor classroom. Amplitude, Mixpanel, BigQuery, and homegrown warehouses all appear, but only after you can sketch the behaviour without a login. If the sketch is wrong, the SQL will be expensive.
- 01Survey the terrain You bring a live app. We refuse hypotheticals after week one.
- 02Draw, then instrument Taxonomies are drafted on paper and attacked in group critique before anyone opens a schema file.
- 03Defend a decision The last assignment is a one-page recommendation a sceptical CFO could read on a train.
612practitioners who finished a public cohort
19open programmes since the 2018 studio year
41private workshops for United Kingdom product teams
14-daywritten critique turnaround during a live course
Journal
Notes from the drafting table.
Event names that survive a reorg
Object–action English, banned synonyms, and why “clicked_button” is a trap.
Reading retention without vanity
N-day curves lie politely. Windowed cohorts tell you who actually came back.
When funnels lie about drop-off
Unordered events, multi-device identity, and the quiet damage of an extra step.
Next conversation
Bring the tracking plan you are slightly ashamed of.
We read it. We mark it. If a public cohort is the wrong shape, we will say so and point you toward a private week instead.