Signal Cartography
Eight weeks drawing a map of what your app actually does — then throwing out the events that do not earn a place on it.
What the weeks are for
Each module ends with a working artefact in your own product, not a slide you file. Vendors are interchangeable; the grammar is not.
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Event grammar
Naming, properties, and versioning. We write a one-page dictionary and kill synonyms that have been inflating “engagement” for a year.
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Funnel honesty
Where drop-off is invented by a missing step, a duplicated fire, or a success event that fires on page load. You rebuild one revenue funnel from raw events.
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Cohort paper
Entry events, windows, and re-entry. We match cohort logic to how your product is actually used in the United Kingdom week — including bank holidays that wreck naïve DAU.
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Runtime maps
From schema to a dashboard a non-analyst can interrogate. If a tile cannot name the decision it supports, it does not ship.
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Review theatre
Presenting numbers to a sceptical board without a second “activation” definition hiding in the appendix.
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Handover
Owners, deprecation rules, and a monthly hour that keeps the taxonomy alive after the cohort ends.
You should be able to…
- Write an event name that still makes sense after a reorg.
- Explain a funnel step to finance without pointing at a vendor screenshot.
- Choose a cohort window that matches a real product cycle, not a default of 7/30.
- Refuse a dashboard request that cannot name a decision.
- Hand a property dictionary to engineering with owners attached.
- Spot a duplicated fire that is quietly doubling a conversion rate.
Who holds the room
Marta Ellison
Former analytics lead at a UK marketplace. Twelve years of shipping event streams, including three years where the “source of truth” was a warehouse nobody trusted. She still reviews production PRs on Tuesdays.
Fee (informational)
A single Observatory Seat is £1,840 for the eight weeks, including critique of your live taxonomy. Teams of four or more use the Closed Room fee on the fees page. This site does not take payment.
Next remote cohort opens on a rolling calendar; we confirm dates in the reply to your note.
Questions we actually get
No. This programme will not certify you in Amplitude, Mixpanel, or GA4. We work in all three, plus warehouse SQL, but the craft is the point. If you need a button-by-button Mixpanel certificate, this is the wrong room — and we will say so before you pay.
Yes, if they have write access to a real event stream. The homework is unforgiving without production data. We do not invent a toy app for you.
That is the usual starting point. Week one is a controlled demolition, not a tour of best-practice diagrams.
There is another: we will not rewrite your entire instrumentation in eight weeks. You leave with a map and a first repaired funnel. The rest is a year of boring ownership, which is the actual work.
From people who sat the eight weeks
Module four made me delete eleven dashboard tiles. Two of them were my own. The remaining six are the ones the CPO actually opens.
Amelia R. · Bristol
4.2 · internal readout
Clear on grammar. Less useful if you hoped to skip the writing. There is a lot of writing.
Anonymous client in digital banking
Ask for a seat
Tell us which product you ship and what the taxonomy looks like today. We reply within two working days.