The identity seminar forced us to admit our “user_id” was an email hash on iOS and a vendor ID on Android. We still have not fully joined them — that work is ours, not the studio’s — but at least the memo no longer pretends they are the same person.
Flagship programme
Event Taxonomy Studio
Eight UK-afternoon seminars. Twelve seats. You arrive with a redacted event export; you leave with a shorter catalogue and a readout memo that states what the tracker still cannot see.
Learning outcomes
What you should be able to do in week eight
- Write a verb catalogue that a mobile engineer can implement without a side conversation.
- Assign a single owner to every event and a burial date to every retirement.
- Explain identity across anonymous, logged-in, and reset states without waving at “the SDK.”
- Produce one funnel or retention memo with the window, the join key, and the known blind spots.
- Refuse a requested property that is free text, PII-shaped, or unused for ninety days.
Informational fee
£1,180 inc. VAT · Cohort Atelier
Signal Desk recordings of an earlier studio are £420 if you cannot take a live seat. Measurement Partnership (£3,400) adds private workshops on your catalogue. None of these can be purchased on this website. See studio fees.
Request a 2026 seatModules
Eight weeks, in the order we actually teach
01
The inherited tracker
How to read a vendor export without believing the property names. Participants submit a redacted list before the second seminar.
02
Verbs, not screens
A working session that kills screen-named events. We keep a spoken test: can the catalogue be read to a support lead?
03
Properties that earn their column
Enums versus free text. Empty rates. Campaign parameters that nobody has populated since a spring sale.
04
Identity as a plot
Device, user, and the hour after install. We sketch the join on paper before anyone opens SQL.
05
Critique in the room
Two catalogues marked live. The group is asked to delete, not to add. Silence is allowed; defending a vanity event is not.
06
Thin-slice instrumentation
Implement three verbs in a sandbox or staging build. We review diffs, not architecture diagrams.
07
The readout memo
Window, identity rule, one question, one limitation. No slide deck. Helena marks line by line.
08
Handover and burial dates
How the catalogue lives after the cohort. Owners, deprecation, and a one-page note for the next engineer.
Instructor
Helena Crowe
Programme director. Previously analytics lead at a London payments app, where she spent two years collapsing 210 events into a verb list the iOS and Android teams could share. She still marks every readout memo herself. Helena does not teach SQL from first principles and will say so in week one.
Office hours are Tuesdays after the seminar. She will not debug a production tracker on a shared screen.
From people who sat the studio
★★★★☆
Week five’s live critique was useful and slightly bruising. I wanted more time on warehouse modelling; Helena declined and pointed us at a book. Fair, if you accept the studio is about naming, not dbt.
Client in grocery delivery. We cut 40 events. Support tickets about “the funnel looking wrong” dropped because we stopped publishing a tile we could not defend.
Questions we actually hear
Limitations included
Do I need to already use a particular analytics vendor?
No. The studio has hosted Mixpanel, Amplitude, Firebase, Snowplow, and a pair of teams on raw warehouse events. The catalogue is the subject, not the UI of a vendor.
What is the real limitation of this programme?
We will not make Mixpanel or Amplitude certify you, and we do not teach SQL from zero. You should already be able to join two tables or have a colleague who can. We also refuse production logins. If your tracker is on fire, hire an engineer; the studio marks language, it does not ship a patch.
Can two people from the same product share a seat?
No. Two people need two seats. A second colleague on the same eight weeks is invoiced at £980. One person cannot “relay” the critique; the room relies on the person who owns the schema being present.
What if our event list is confidential?
Redact names of customers, campaign IDs, and anything that looks like PII. If you cannot redact enough to show the verbs, wait until you can. We do not sign NDAs for a twelve-person seminar.