We started because dashboards had begun to argue with each other.
Tool Mapbase is based in Llandow, with most of the teaching remote. The work is app analytics: the events an application emits, the properties that travel with them, and the stories product teams tell from both.
Mission
We want fewer fictional funnels in United Kingdom product organisations. Not fewer charts — fewer charts that cannot be reconciled with the code that produced them. A tracking plan is a public document. If it cannot be read aloud in a sprint review, it is not finished.
The house does not sell software. Students keep the vendors they already pay. We teach the layer those vendors cannot: the names, the contracts, and the humility to delete an event that never earned its keep.
Pedagogy
Lessons are editorial. You bring writing — a schema, a dashboard screenshot, a Slack argument — and we mark it. Lectures exist, but they are short. The longer hours are critique, the way a studio might sit with a drawing rather than a slide deck about drawing.
We prefer small rooms. When a cohort grows past sixteen we split it. App analytics is easier to fake in a large webinar; it is harder to hide a vague property name when the person next to you has to implement it.
Community
Alumni receive the journal and an invitation to two open clinics a year. There is no points system. People return because their next app still needs a taxonomy, and because it is useful to hear how a grocery client solved identity without copying a marketplace’s events.
The student journey
Most people arrive after a painful quarterly review: two dashboards, two “activations”, one embarrassed silence. The first fortnight is inventory. The middle is grammar. The last is a clinic in which you must defend deletions as well as additions. After that, you are not certified; you are simply harder to rush.
If you work in the United Kingdom, examples will feel close to home — ICO-shaped caution around identifiers, store listing language, and the oddity of a Sunday-evening spike that is just football. Remote students from elsewhere are welcome; the law we teach to is UK law when we talk about data.