Field notes · Llandow & remote

We teach teams to hear their apps without drowning in charts.

Tool Mapbase is a small house for app analytics: event names that survive a reorg, properties that mean one thing, and retention windows that match how people actually return.

The Event Taxonomy Atelier
Quiet, dark office interior with long table and warm lamps
2,847 production events reviewed with students last year — including the ones nobody wanted to admit were duplicates.
Heard after class
“The module on identity stitching stopped our Android and iOS funnels from pretending they were the same person.”
Priya N., growth lead, Bristol
“I still argue with design about screen names. The difference is the argument now has a dictionary.”
Client in grocery retail
“Eleven weeks is long. The taxonomy we left with is shorter than the one we arrived with, which was the point.”
Owen Hale, product analytics, Edinburgh
Programmes

Three doors into the same craft

All programmes
Analytics dashboard on a wide monitor in low light

Event Taxonomy Atelier

Our flagship. Inventory, naming, property contracts, and a live schema critique over eleven weeks.

Sit with the syllabus
Laptop showing charts beside a notebook

Retention Archaeology

For teams whose DAU looks healthy while a single cohort is quietly thinning. Six sessions, no vanity curves.

Ask for the next intake
Printed graphs spread across a wooden desk

Funnel Cartography

Map the path people actually take through an app, including the back buttons product hoped nobody used.

Enquire
City office at night with lit windows
How the house teaches

We treat a tracking plan as a piece of writing.

App analytics fails in the nouns. A “tap” that sometimes means purchase, a “user_id” that sometimes means device — these are literary problems with operational consequences. Students bring a live schema, or a messy export, and we edit it in public.

Tuition is in English, with examples drawn from consumer and B2B apps shipping to the United Kingdom. We do not sell a platform, and we do not pretend a certificate replaces a patient instrumentation review.

Read the house note
What you leave with

A working grammar, not a wallpaper of charts

  1. An event inventory that a new joiner can read

    Every event named as verb plus object, with an owner, a trigger, and a reason it still exists.

  2. Property contracts

    Types, allowed values, and the places you must not overload a string because it was convenient on a Friday.

  3. Cohort definitions product will actually reuse

    Written in the language of the app, not in the dialect of whichever warehouse intern arrived last.

  4. A governance note

    Who may add an event, who may deprecate one, and how design hears about both.

11weeks in the flagship atelier
63product teams taught since 2021
7 yrsmedian in-app tenure of tutors
18core event patterns we keep returning to
Journal

Recent field notes

The full journal
Open notebook with handwritten notes

Schema

Naming events that survive a reorg

Why “Home_Tapped” becomes a liability the month design splits the tab bar.

 Person working on a laptop at a wooden table

Retention

When DAU hides a cohort collapse

A healthy daily number can still be a recruiting treadmill.
Seats

If your schema already embarrasses you, you are qualified.

Write to the house. Say what the app does, and which number you no longer believe.

Write to Llandow