Module four on activation was the week our CPO stopped asking for a single green number. We still argue, but we argue from the contract.
Sofia · Product, Dublin (commutes in for London lunch)
Flagship · 8 weeks
Product Signal Atelier
A working room for people who already have charts and still cannot explain activation without a footnote. Thursday evenings, United Kingdom time.
The atelier is the programme we still argue about between seasons. It assumes you can open your analytics tool without a tutorial. It does not assume your event names mean anything to a colleague hired last month. You will write, strike, and rewrite a dictionary. You will present a funnel that has a named owner. You will hold a cohort long enough to be bored by it.
What you leave with
- A versioned event dictionary with required properties and deprecation notes
- An activation contract: the event, the exclusion rules, and who may change it
- A thirteen-week retention reading, including what would falsify it
- A critique letter from the room on one live readout
Modules
1 · Inventory without mercy
Export the event list. Strike anything that cannot be defined in one sentence. Map duplicates. This week produces discomfort and a shorter spreadsheet.
2 · Identity, merge, and the quiet disaster of resettable ids
Anonymous to known, device to user, and the UK-shaped problem of consent withdrawing an identifier you still join on in the warehouse.
3 · Funnels that survive a rename
Ordered steps as contracts, not screenshots. We practise converting a “happy path” slide into exclusions a sceptic would demand.
4 · Activation as a political object
Who benefits from a loose definition. How to pick a first-value event that product, growth, and finance can all dislike equally — which is often the honest one.
5 · Retention without theatre
Calendar vs. bounded retention, resurrection, and the paragraph you will actually send. Guest hour with a former FP&A lead.
6 · Properties, enums, and the event that should have been two
When a boolean hid a journey. When “type” became a junk drawer. Schema craft inside the atelier, not as a side quest.
7 · The weekly readout
A document, not a dashboard tour. What moved, what did not, what you will not claim. Students present to the room.
8 · Critique and leaving well
Final packets. How to hand a dictionary to a successor. What the atelier will not have fixed — including vendor limitations you still have to live with.
Instructor
Helena Voss
Former lead for product instrumentation at a London marketplace, then a stretch in a payments firm that had five Mixpanel projects and no owner. She has taught the atelier since 2021. She still writes event specs by hand before anyone opens a tracking plan tool.
Notes from the room
I underused the identity module because our app still has a guest checkout we refuse to touch. The atelier cannot politically fix that. Helena said so in week two, which I needed to hear before I blamed the curriculum.
Tom W. · Oxford
Questions we hear twice
Do I need SQL?
Enough to join a user table to an events table and to distrust a GUI that hides the join. We are not a SQL school. If you have never written a WHERE clause, take a weekend primer first; you will otherwise spend week five lost in the warehouse rather than in the cohort.
Can I use GA4 only?
You can. We will be frank about its event model and about exploration sampling. Several students have completed the atelier on GA4 plus a spreadsheet. It is slower. It is honest.
What will this not do?
It will not migrate your stack, hire your analyst, or produce a board-ready forecast. It also will not make a product with no repeat use look retained. If your app is a one-time utility, we will spend week five saying so, and that conversation is often the most expensive one in the room — in attention, not in fees.
How large is the room?
Twelve seats. We have run with nine. We cancel below seven rather than pad with spectators.