The taxonomy week was uncomfortable in a useful way. We retired fourteen events that had been inflating “engagement” since 2023. I still argue with our data lead about property casing.
Letters
What operators actually sent back.
These notes refer to programmes on this site — Signal Architecture, Retention Cartography, the Atelier — not to a generic “course”. One of them is cool on purpose. We kept it.
Edinburgh. Clinic Ticket on a Thursday. Ninety minutes on a single noisy property called source. The recap arrived Monday with a freeze protocol. That is the whole review.
★★★★☆
Clearer retention language than our last consultancy. The silent-week plate from Retention Cartography is now in our board appendix. I wanted a longer SQL appendix; they stay in the product layer on purpose, which I accept and still mildly resent.
Two-day Atelier with our iOS lead. We left with a deletion list taped above the kettle. Not glamorous. The kettle list is still there.
M05 of Signal Architecture refused to let us dress a shipping decision as a “learning”. Our growth lead disliked the session. I booked Observatory time afterwards, which tells you which of us found it useful.
Case note I
A Dundee games studio and the extra life that was not a user.
A mid-size studio brought Signal Architecture after their “returning player” line had risen for eleven months. The packet session_resume fired on a hot-start from a push as well as on a genuine second-day open. Module 03 forced a grain choice. They published the limitation in their own all-hands: eleven months of the curve were a mix, not a miracle.
They did not “fix culture”. They froze session_resume properties, split a new packet for push-wake, and stopped putting the old line in publisher updates. Ioan sat the viva; a visiting operator from Leamington asked whether QA devices were still in the denominator. They were. That sentence went into the charter the same afternoon.
Case note II
A Midlands grocery app that counted staff as activation.
Ledger Seat, four weeks. The activation event included an internal scheme code used by store managers to demonstrate the app on the shop floor. Growth work for a year had been aimed at a number that moved when head office ran training.
The owner map — Plate I of the Atlas, taught in miniature — assigned the event to product, not to operations. Staff packets went to the forbidden sea. Partial refund of a prior vendor workshop was their business; our part was the freeze. The operator wrote afterwards that the board meeting was “short and unkind, which we needed”. We did not attend the board meeting.