21 August 2025
When product and finance share a funnel
A conversion path is a story about corridors. Finance needs the door that took money. Product needs the doors people actually walked through, including the ones the SDK skipped.
The usual peace treaty is a slide with five steps: visit, sign up, activate, pay, retain. Each word is a committee. Deep links dump people into step three. Store billing completes in a callback that never hits step four in the product analytics tool. A user who resumes from background looks like a new visit. The slide still gets presented because it is a shape everyone recognises.
In Funnel Forensics we draw two paths on the same page. Path A is what the SDK saw. Path B is what finance’s ledger saw. The work is the legend that maps one to the other — and the list of users who exist in only one path. Those people are not “noise”. They are the argument.
Screens the SDK never saw
Native purchase sheets. Email magic links. Customer-support comps. Chargebacks. A web checkout that sits on a different domain and a different cookie jar. If your funnel pretends these are rare, you are writing fiction for a consumer app of any size.
Sharing a funnel does not mean product adopts finance’s grain, or the reverse. It means both desks can point to the same objects: offer shown, offer accepted, money received, access granted. Those four are enough for most subscription arguments. Extra steps belong in an appendix until they have owners.
A letter, not a live widget
We still ask students to write the funnel as a letter. Live dashboards drift when someone “tidies” a filter. A letter dated on the last sitting can be compared to next quarter’s letter. That is the whole point of an atlas.
If this is the fight currently happening in your weekly, the short studio exists, and so does the longer table.