Flagship programme

Cohort Signal Lab

Eleven weeks in a closed circle. You leave with a tracking plan that can survive a sceptical finance partner, and a retention story that names its own limits.

Product team discussing notes around a table in a glass meeting room
Live Chamber evening — instrumentation critique, not slide theatre

What you will be able to do

  • Write an event taxonomy with verbs a designer can argue with, and properties a warehouse can join.
  • Choose a cohort window that matches how your app is actually used, not a vendor default.
  • Retire vanity events in writing, with a note the rest of the company can live with.
  • Stand up a weekly “signal desk” ritual that does not require a new dashboard every sprint.

Fees below are published so teams can budget. There is no checkout on this site.

Modules

  1. Week 1 — Naming the product What “the app” is allowed to mean. A one-page object list before any event is drawn.
  2. Week 2 — Verbs before properties A taxonomy workshop. Duplicate nouns are treated as a design smell, not a data problem.
  3. Week 3 — Instrumentation as correspondence Pull requests, QA notes, and the cost of shipping a property you cannot define.
  4. Week 4 — Windows D1, D7, and the quieter 14-day return habit. Why vendor templates lie kindly.
  5. Week 5 — Silent reading No live session. You annotate one retained cohort and one lost one from your own product.
  6. Week 6 — Funnels without costume Drop-off that is a permission prompt, not a “mindset.”
  7. Week 7 — Replay as evidence, not spectacle Sampling rules and when watching is unethical or simply lazy.
  8. Week 8 — The weekly desk A 40-minute ritual that a product trio can keep after we leave.
  9. Week 9 — Board English Translating a retention caveat so it is not sanded off in a pack.
  10. Week 10 — Public critique One live metric from each pair, read aloud. Guests may not advertise during this hour.
  11. Week 11 — Handover A tracking-plan letter to your future selves, dated.

Tutor

Portrait of Helen Cartwright, programme tutor

Helen Cartwright

Helen spent nine years as telemetry lead at a Manchester marketplace, then two as an independent instrumentation editor for UK product groups. She teaches the Lab because she is tired of event names that only the original author can decode.

She does not consult on paid acquisition. The Lab stops at in-app behaviour.

From people who sat the Lab

Week six was when our “activation” finally meant the same thing in product and finance. The argument lasted two hours and was the most expensive meeting we have had, in a good sense.

Priya Raman · staff product manager, Edinburgh fintech

I wanted more Android-specific material than we got. The taxonomy work still paid for the seat; I just had to bring my own crash-free session notes.

Owen, Leeds

Questions we hear before week one

Do we need a specific analytics vendor?

No. Guests arrive on Amplitude, Mixpanel, PostHog, or a warehouse-only stack. The Lab is about names and windows, not a click-path in one UI.

What will this not cover?

Paid-user acquisition modelling is out of scope. We stop at in-app behaviour. Teams that live inside media-mix models usually feel that gap in week nine, and we name it rather than stretching the syllabus.

Can a single person attend?

Yes, if you can change tracking without a three-week ticket. Pairs learn faster because the argument happens in the room instead of later on Slack.

Ask about the next circle

Tell us the product you ship. We reply within two working days. This form does not take payment.