1. Birthdays
Signup, first key action, or first paid event. We compare three definitions on the same export so you can see how “retention” moves when only the birthday changes.
Flagship · 8 weeks · remote or Little Abington
The Weekly Retention Ledger
A working desk for product managers who must report cohorts to people who still ask for a single retention number. You leave with a written week-zero definition, a table template that ages, and a pack you can defend.
Learning outcomes
By the last session you should be able to:
- Write a one-paragraph definition of the population and its birthday, and keep it stable for a quarter.
- Separate calendar weeks from cohort age, and show why a Tuesday deploy does not rewrite week zero.
- Mark resurrection without folding it into “still active.”
- Print sample size beside every rate, and leave cells blank when n is not yet mature.
- Cut a board pack to one table, one caveat, and one decision.
Informational fees
Live desk: £1,140. Annotated notes only: £560. In-house marking of a current pack is quoted separately. This page does not take payment.
Seats are small on purpose. We read homework. If you need a self-paced video library, this is the wrong house.
Ask for the next intakeModules
What the eight weeks actually contain
2. Age versus calendar
Why a heatmap with dates along the top is not a cohort table. You rebuild one of your own charts with age on the columns and maturity footnotes in the last row.
3. Alive, silent, returned
Three states, three columns. The usual product dashboard collapses them. We do not.
4. Mix and sample
Paid versus organic, iOS versus web, GB versus everywhere else. You learn when a split is required and when it is noise dressed as insight.
5. The eight-minute pack
You submit a draft. We cut slides. The surviving page has to be readable by someone who did not sit the previous seven weeks.
6. Limits
What a cohort table cannot answer: causality, pricing power, brand. We practise saying “this table does not show that” in a room that wants it to.
Instructor
Helen Quayle
Helen spent a decade in product at two UK marketplaces before teaching. She still marks every ledger by hand. She will not debug your warehouse, and she will say so in week one.
From people who sat this desk
Module two forced us to stop using a date heatmap as if it were retention. Our growth review is now shorter and slightly more uncomfortable, which is the point.
I wanted SQL recipes. There are almost none. The value was the argument about week zero, which our data team had been politely ignoring.
Questions we actually get
Do I need SQL?
You need an export you can open. CSV is enough. We do not teach warehouse modelling, dbt, or how to administer Amplitude. That is a real limitation: if your bottleneck is the pipeline, hire an analyst or a course that starts there.
Is the live desk recorded?
Yes, for seated learners, for six weeks after the last session. Recordings are not sold separately from the notes package.
Can a whole product trio join?
Yes, at the live-desk fee per person. We will not mark three packs as if they were one seat.