“Week four’s identity rules stopped us counting the same iPad as four trialists. I wanted more games examples. The freeze protocol is on our wiki anyway.”
Flagship programme6 weeks · remote seminars · Kirktown desk hours
Signal Architecture
A term for the person who inherits a noisy event stream and is expected to make it speak. We treat App Analytics as grammar: names, properties, identity, and the political work of deleting events the organisation has grown fond of.
Informational fee £2,140 per seat. Materials and two written critiques included. This page cannot take payment; enrolment is confirmed by email after a one-page brief.
Modules
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01
The forbidden synonym list
You inventory every event that means “started checkout”. We write a house style for verbs, objects, and casing, then freeze a synonym ban that product marketing cannot quietly undo.
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02
Property budgets
Each event receives a ration of properties. We practise saying no to “device_model_raw” and yes to a documented derived field. The artefact is a one-page dictionary, not a wiki.
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03
Identity without romance
Anonymous IDs, login, logout, and the mess of shared family devices. You draft stitching rules that a lawyer in the United Kingdom could read without wincing.
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04
The thin slice
Instrument one journey — typically trial start to first paid action — in a sandbox or a willing production flag. We compare the stream to the product conversation, line by line.
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05
Board-pack English
A weekly read-out in prose. No screenshot galleries. You learn to put the limitation in the second sentence so nobody can accuse you of theatre.
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06
Handover and the freeze
How a taxonomy dies after the consultant leaves. We write an amendment protocol and a freeze window, then sit with your engineer for a recorded walkthrough.
What you should be able to do
- Defend an event name in a sceptical product review.
- Reject a property request with a written budget remaining.
- Describe identity stitching without promising a perfect user.
- Ship a thin instrumentation slice with a rollback note.
- Write a weekly App Analytics letter a non-analyst will finish.
- Hand a freeze protocol to the next person who owns the stream.
Instructor
Helena Voss
Helena ran instrumentation for a London marketplace through two rebrands and one painful GDPR rebuild. She now teaches from Kirktown, with visiting hours on Tuesdays. She will not pretend Amplitude and Mixpanel are interchangeable; the homework currently leans Mixpanel, which some Amplitude houses find annoying — we say so in week one.
Fee, in plain terms
Signal Architecture is listed at £2,140. That covers six seminars, two written critiques of your taxonomy, and office hours. Travel to Kirktown is not included because the term is remote. We do not bundle software licences; bring whatever warehouse or product-analytics tool you already pay for.
Payment, when you enrol, is arranged off-site by invoice. Read refunds before you write.
Who should wait
If you have never shipped an event, start with a Desk Note on the fees page. If your legal team forbids any production flags this quarter, we can still run the taxonomy on a sandbox, but the thin-slice module will be thinner than advertised — that is a real limitation, not a footnote.
Questions we actually get
Do you teach a specific vendor?
No vendor certification. Examples currently use Mixpanel export files and a generic event JSON. Amplitude houses should expect to translate; we do not pretend the UI tours are the point of App Analytics.
Can a whole squad join?
Two seats work. Five seats turn the seminar into a town hall. For a squad, ask about the Retained Desk on the fees page instead of buying five Signal Architecture chairs.
What if our app is games, not fintech?
The grammar still holds. Sessionisation and economy events take more airtime; checkout metaphors take less. Say so in the brief so Helena does not spend week four on SCA.
Is there a certificate?
A letter confirming completion, on studio paper. It is not a regulated qualification in the United Kingdom. Bring the taxonomy you wrote; that is the credential that survives.
From people who sat the term
★★★★☆
Signal Architecture · “Harsh on synonyms. Fair. The board-pack English module is the bit my CPO noticed.”