Flagship programme
Cohort Telemetry Studio
Six weeks, twelve live sessions, one product you already ship. You will not build a fantasy app for the exercise. You will bring the messy telemetry you already have.
The Studio is for senior ICs, product managers, and analytics leads who can already open Amplitude or a warehouse and still leave the room arguing about what “active” meant. We assume SQL comfort or a colleague who has it. We do not assume a clean tracking plan.
Work happens on Tuesdays and Thursdays, late afternoon UK time, with a Friday office hour that is optional and usually full. Between sessions you annotate your own events. We review those annotations in the room, which is why the cohort stays under fourteen people.
What you should be able to do afterwards
- Write an event grammar that a new engineer can implement without a hallway briefing.
- Define a cohort with inclusion rules you can read aloud to finance without blushing.
- Draw a retention landscape that separates habit, lock-in, and empty re-opens.
- Produce a two-page readout that names uncertainty instead of hiding it in a sparkline.
Modules
Signal before spectacle
We begin with the questions your board already asks, then work backwards to the events that could actually answer them. Decorative tiles are named as such and parked.
Event grammar
Object, action, context. Identity joins. The quiet violence of a duplicated `screen_view`. You rewrite ten of your live events and justify each rename.
Cohorts that mean something
First-seen versus first-valued. Exclusion rules. Why “signed up in March” is not a cohort if March contained a TV burst and a broken email sequence.
Retention as a landscape
Curves, bounded ranges, and the habit of asking who is missing. You produce one landscape for a messy onboarding path and one for a mature surface.
Readouts for sceptical rooms
A written brief, a spoken ten minutes, and a colleague playing the role of a CFO who has been promised lift before. No animation. No countdown to a target.
Tutor
Dr Miriam Ellison
Miriam spent nine years inside product analytics teams in London and Edinburgh, then left to write tracking plans that other people could inherit. She tutors the Studio from Cornwall and still reviews schemas for two former employers, which keeps the examples uncomfortably current.
Fee, in plain figures
The current term is listed at £2,480 per seat, including critique hours and a written end-of-term note on your taxonomy. This is not a checkout. If you wish to sit the next cohort, write to the studio and we will confirm dates. See refunds for what happens if a term is cancelled or a seat is released early.
Questions we actually hear
Do I need Amplitude, Mixpanel, or a warehouse?
Any of those, or a well-kept event log. The Studio is tool-agnostic by necessity: grammar travels, vendor click-paths do not. If your only source is a Google Sheet of weekly actives, wait until there is a raw event stream.
Can a whole team attend on one seat?
No. A seat is one voice in the room. Two colleagues may share notes afterwards; they may not share the microphone. Teams of three or more should ask about a private Observatory table instead.
What will this programme not cover?
We do not teach mobile measurement partner configuration, paid-acquisition attribution windows, or SKAN postbacks. Those stacks deserve their own specialists. If your urgent problem is “which campaign bought this install”, this is the wrong room, and we will say so before you enrol.
How much homework is real?
Plan for four to six hours a week on your own events. People who treat the Studio as a lecture series finish with a prettier notebook and the same schema.
From recent seats
Module four made me redraw the onboarding landscape we had been calling “healthy”. The second week was still a cliff; we had been averaging it away.
Miriam’s written note at the end named three events we should never have shipped. Slightly bruising. Accurate.