“Module 5’s briefing rehearsal exposed how often I buried the caveat. My next board deck opened with the limitation instead of hiding it.”
Flagship course
Retention Signal Studio
Six weeks to read cohorts with discipline, design retention experiments, and brief leadership without inflating the story.
Learning outcomes
- Distinguish retention definitions (classic, bounded, rolling) and pick one per product surface.
- Build a cohort chart critique that spots selection bias and time-zone artefacts.
- Draft a retention experiment brief with primary metric, guardrails, and stop rules.
- Deliver a ten-minute stakeholder narrative that separates signal from noise.
Modules
- Module 1 — Retention vocabulary Definitions, windows, and why “retained users” slides argue past each other.
- Module 2 — Cohort craft Building and reading cohort tables; common chart lies; sample homework apps.
- Module 3 — Instrumentation for retention Which events must fire cleanly before analysis is trustworthy.
- Module 4 — Experiment design Hypothesis templates, exposure logging, and what not to A/B.
- Module 5 — Leadership brief Structure, visuals, and handling aggressive follow-up questions.
- Module 6 — Studio critique Live review of learner briefs with coach annotations.
Maya Ellison
Lead instructor
Former analytics lead at two UK consumer apps. Maya focuses on retention storytelling and the politics of metric choice inside product orgs.
FAQ
Do I need SQL?
Comfortable SQL helps for optional stretch tasks, but core exercises use exported CSVs and chart critiques. We do not teach warehouse administration.
Which analytics tools are covered?
Concepts are tool-agnostic. Screenshots rotate across common product analytics suites so you are not locked to one vendor UI.
What is a real limitation of this course?
Retention Signal Studio will not rebuild your entire tracking plan for you. If your event stream is chaotic, you will still need engineering time after the course — we teach you how to specify that work, not how to implement SDKs end-to-end.
Are live clinics required?
Only on Pulse Desk and Signal Room. Beacon Access learners receive recordings of selected clinic segments, not live seats.
Reviews from this course
Useful overall. The cohort homework mirrors messy data well. I wanted one more Android-specific instrumentation checklist — still had to invent ours.