Flagship programme
The Cohort Atlas
Fourteen weeks of studio time for people who already ship an app and are tired of explaining a blended retention number as if it were a landscape.
What you leave holding
Not a certificate in a vendor’s interface. A written atlas: named cohorts, the events that define them, the questions you will not answer with the current stream, and a one-page letter your finance partner can actually use.
- A taxonomy that distinguishes objects from marketing wrappers
- Retention drawn by first-week experience, not by a single “activated” flag
- Paywall and trial instrumentation that finance and product can share
- A critique record from two live dashboard sittings
Informational fee: £1,840 for the Atlas Seat. The Reading Room notes-only option and the Grid Mandate retainer are listed on Fees. There is no payment form on this page.
Modules
The fourteen weeks, compressed
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The first thirty days of an event stream
How to read a raw export before anyone builds a “pretty” dashboard. Missing timestamps, duplicate identifies, and the peculiar silence of a webview that never fired.
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Taxonomies that do not rot
Objects, verbs, properties, and a written rule for retiring names. You will draft the catalogue for your own app, not a fictional bakery.
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Retention as a landscape
N-day, unbounded, and range retention — and why mixing them in one slide is a kind of rhetoric. We draw the same cohort three ways and argue about which one belongs in the board pack.
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Paywall, trial, and billing retry
The screens finance cares about. Store callbacks, grace periods, and the difference between “saw paywall” and “was offered a price”.
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When finance asks for a funnel
How to present a conversion path without pretending every user walked the same corridor. Deep links and resume-from-background are treated as first-class, not footnotes.
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Studio critique
Two live readings of student dashboards. The room is allowed to be quiet. Praise is specific; so is the list of charts we ask you to take down.
Outcomes we will hold you to
By the last Saturday you should be able to defend, in writing: the definition of a new user; the first-week experiences that split your base; and at least two metrics you have stopped reporting because they cannot survive a follow-up question. If you cannot yet, we say so in the critique notes — the Atlas is not a participation ribbon.
Tutor
Imogen Hartley
Imogen led product analytics for a FTSE-listed retailer before founding the Ridsdale sitting of Connectvectorgrid. She still keeps a paper ledger of event names she has personally killed. Students know her for refusing to look at a chart until the underlying event is read aloud.
She teaches The Cohort Atlas and the Signal Studio method. She does not sit vendor certification exams on your behalf.
Students on this programme
Week five’s paywall work changed how we talk to subscriptions. I still think the Saturday critiques run long — I missed a child’s swimming lesson for the week-8 sitting — but the atlas we took back is the document our CFO now quotes.
I came for Mixpanel recipes. Imogen declined to provide them. What I got instead was a cohort definition our Android and iOS leads would both sign. That was the actual problem.
Questions we hear before a seat is taken
Do I need SQL?
Enough to pull a raw event table or to sit beside someone who can. The Atlas is not a SQL bootcamp. If your warehouse is locked behind a data team that will not run extracts, write to us before you pay an invoice — that constraint is real.
Which analytics product do you teach?
None as a vendor course. We have seen Amplitude, Mixpanel, Statsig, and warehouse-native stacks. The limitation, stated plainly: we do not certify Mixpanel or Amplitude administrators. Teams that need those badges should sit the vendor exams separately. We also do not provision a tool; if you have nothing collecting events yet, start elsewhere.
Is the fee refundable if I cannot attend a Saturday?
Missed lectures can be caught via recordings. Missed critiques cannot be fully reconstructed. See the refund note for the window after an invoice is paid.
Can a whole team share one seat?
No. Critique depends on one person being accountable for the atlas. A second colleague may audit lectures by arrangement; they do not submit work.