Why this matters
Product judgment improves when observation, instrumentation, and qualitative context can disagree in useful ways. The goal is not more tracking; it is enough trustworthy evidence to understand activation, return, failure, and feature adoption.
Concepts to learn
- Event vocabulary and property design
- Funnels, activation, retention, and adoption
- Product and operational metrics
- Data quality and event-version governance
- Privacy-conscious instrumentation
- Turning evidence into a product decision
Apply It in Casset
Casset is the working environment for this skill—not the curriculum itself.
- Extend the canonical `app_*` event vocabulary instead of creating a competing `mini_app_*` schema; distinguish open, mount completion, mount failure, and playback outcomes.
- Add a deliberately scoped `profile_viewed` event and define the privacy-safe properties needed to study return and mobile failure.
- Verify which events persist only in production, then document the difference between accepted telemetry, trustworthy data, and an actual product insight.
- Study which Casset Apps open, whether playback begins, where an App fails to mount, and which flows are abandoned—then make one product decision.
Suggested project
One trustworthy product funnel
Instrument, validate, and interpret one Profile World journey from view to App open to successful playback.
Open project notebookEvidence of completion
These are completion conditions, not claimed achievements. Each stays planned until it links to a real artifact or verification.
- implementationA versioned event schema using the existing analytics bridgeplanned
- testsValidation tests for event names, properties, and sanitizationplanned
- analyticsOne funnel or cohort result with data-quality caveatsplanned
- observationA product decision that combines telemetry with direct observationplanned
Open questions
- What is the smallest event vocabulary that can still explain a failed experience?
- How should operational failure data and product-behavior data meet without becoming the same thing?
Related notes
Books, talks, and useful things
- bookLean AnalyticsAlistair Croll & Benjamin Yoskovitz
- articleHow to Measure Anything
Keep the question closer than the chart.
Reflection journal
Instrumentation is a product model written in verbs. If the verbs are vague, the analysis will be too.