Letters, ratings, and two longer case notes

Manchester news product · Cohort Atlas, winter sitting

The team arrived with a north-star called loyal readers, defined as anyone who opened the app four days in a week. Push campaigns were firing into that definition, so the metric rose whenever editorial bought attention, then fell when the budget paused. It was a thermometer of spend, not of habit.

During taxonomy week they split “open from push” from “open from icon”. Retention drawn on the second group was quieter and, to the editor’s credit, more useful. The atlas they left with has three first-week experiences: registered during a live blog, registered from a crossword, registered from a paywall hit. Those are the lines they now take to the weekly.

They did not implement our whole catalogue. Two event names remain overloaded because a contractor left mid-quarter. We recorded that as an open risk rather than polishing it out of the case.

Subscription fitness · Event Taxonomy Studio, then Atlas Seat

Activation included a ten-second class preview. Finance thought activation meant a billed start. Product thought it meant “touched a workout”. The studio spent most of week two refusing to chart anything until those three meanings had separate names. After the Atlas paywall module, trial-start and billing-retry were no longer folded into a single “subscribe” event.

Twelve weeks later they wrote that churn conversations had become shorter, not happier — the number was lower once previews were excluded — and that this was the point.