Retention Telemetry Studio · Stream Kernelcore

What you will actually produce

A property dictionary for one product surface, with owners and deprecation dates
A written inclusion rule for a retention cohort, in sentences a lawyer could parse
A rebuilt funnel with at least one leak classified as instrumentation versus product
A two-page readout defended live, including what you refuse to claim
A deprecation log you can hand to engineering without a translation meeting
Six annotated critiques of other seats’ dictionaries — we mark generosity as well as precision

Modules

Inventory without flattery

Export every event that fired last month. We sort them into load-bearing, decorative, and haunted. You will be asked to kill at least two names.

Identity, session, and the join you keep postponing

Anonymous to known, app to web, the user who logs in after installing twice. If your identity graph is a rumour, retention is a rumour too.

The property dictionary

Types, allowed values, null policy, and who is allowed to invent a new key. This is the artefact most seats say they wanted and few had started.

Cohorts that survive an App Store update

Version gating, forced upgrades, and the week a store review freeze quietly removed a screen. We treat that week as a first-class object.

Funnel leaks, classified

You rebuild one funnel from raw events, then label each drop: product, copy, latency, or a duplicate event with a nicer name.

The two-page readout

What moved, what we trust, what we do next Tuesday. Visiting mentors are instructed to interrupt if a chart appears without an inclusion rule.

Instructor

Margot Ellison

Former head of product measurement at a subscription news app, now the studio’s principal correspondent. Margot writes the marking rubrics and sits the first four live sessions of every Studio Bench. She is precise about language and impatient with vanity retention that excludes people who merely opened a push.

Questions we actually hear

Do I need SQL?

You need enough to select a week of events and group them. We are not a warehouse course. If you cannot join two tables, we provide a sandbox and a teaching assistant for the first fortnight.

What will this studio not cover?

We do not teach advertising-network setup, media mix modelling, or how to buy paid acquisition. If your brief is spend efficiency across channels, this studio will feel incomplete and you should not take a seat expecting otherwise.

Can I use a sandbox instead of production?

Yes. Several seats arrive under NDAs that forbid exporting events. The sandbox is a fictional commuting app with a messy schema we maintain on purpose.

How heavy is the work between sessions?

Plan for five focused hours a week. Week four is heavier because the dictionary is due. People in a release freeze have asked us to shift that deadline; we allow one slip, not a rewrite of the calendar.

From people who sat the bench

I wanted a prettier Mixpanel. I received a deprecation log and a fight with engineering I should have had a year earlier. The sandbox commuting app is slightly too clever, which became obvious when I tried to copy its identity model into ours.

Anonymous client in digital health · Studio Bench, autumn intake

Margot’s insistence that the inclusion rule sit on slide one shortened our QBR by eleven minutes. I timed it. The live clinics still run long.

Priya S. · Bristol · experiment readout module

Ask for a syllabus

This form does not enrol you. It reaches the desk. We reply within two working days.