I
The inventory no one wanted to open
Every event that claims a return visit is listed, spoken aloud, and either kept, renamed, or scheduled for deletion. Properties that duplicate user tables are marked as political, not technical.
Flagship programme
Retention Architecture
Six weeks to stop treating return as a vibe. You will leave with a cohort specification, a curve you can explain without a laser pointer, and a list of events that should never have been allowed to describe “coming back.”
Modules
The six sittings
II
What “active” has been allowed to mean
A seminar on denominators. Students bring the sentence their company uses in all-hands. We take it apart until the remaining words could be implemented by someone who was not in the room.
III
Cohort knives
First-week, first-value, first-paid — and the quieter cuts: staff exclusion, contractor accounts, the region that was never instrumented. You write a spec a warehouse can honour.
IV
Curves, truncation, and hope
How smoothing hides a cliff. How a short window flatters a product that has not yet had time to fail. Students must present one chart they no longer trust.
V
The narrative for a sceptical room
A two-page letter, not a deck. Finance and brand are imagined as readers. If a sentence needs a footnote to survive, it is rewritten.
VI
Handover and the ten days after
Who owns the definition when the tutor leaves. A small ritual: the student names a deputy. Office hours exist so the definition does not die in a private notebook.
What you should be able to do afterwards
- Write an event-level definition of return that another analyst can implement without a call.
- Separate staff, test, and genuine user activity without a folklore spreadsheet.
- Choose a window long enough that early truncation cannot flatter the product.
- Explain a dip without reaching for seasonality as a first resort.
- Retire at least one vanity “comeback” event from the live plan.
- Hold a thirty-minute readout in which the chart is smaller than the prose.
Tutor
Miriam Calder
Miriam spent nine years inside a London payments product, latterly as the person who had to explain why “retained” meant three different things to three different directors. She now teaches the architecture she wished that company had written down. She is precise, occasionally dry, and unwilling to mark a cheerful chart that has not earned its cheer.
Informational fee
Retention Architecture is offered under the Atlas seat at £2,450 for the six weeks, or as the academic core of a Chamber engagement if a team needs the diagnosis compressed. This page does not take payment. Invoices follow a confirmed place. VAT is added where it applies.
See studio fees for Trace and Chamber, and refunds for what happens if plans change.
Who it does not suit
If you have no events yet, start with taxonomy or wait. If you need someone to click the tool for you, hire an operator; we teach judgement. If you cannot spare Tuesday evenings and a Saturday morning in week four, the homework will pile into theatre, and we would rather you booked later.
Questions we are asked without ceremony
Do I need Amplitude, Mixpanel, or a warehouse?
Any of them, or a well-kept export. The course is not a vendor certification. You must be able to see event names and timestamps. If access is political inside your company, say so in the first letter; we have declined students who could only send screenshots.
Is there a certificate?
A letter confirming completion, if you want one for a learning budget. No badge, no public leaderboard. The artefact is the cohort spec.
What is the real limitation of this programme?
Six weeks will not repair a tracking plan that has been neglected for years, and it will not create organisational ownership where none exists. Students who cannot name a deputy for the definition usually watch the work fade after office hours end. We would rather say that here than discover it in week six.
Can two people from the same company attend?
Yes, at a second Atlas fee. It is often the better pattern: one person from product, one from data. More than two and we steer you toward Chamber instead, because the seminar table does not scale past argument.
From people who took this syllabus
“Module IV made me throw away a smoothed chart I had used in two board packs. I was annoyed. Then I was grateful, which is a worse feeling to admit.”
The cohort worksheet from week three is still taped inside our war-room cupboard. The rest of the homework I filed and have not opened. That is on me, not on Calder.