The practice in Birmingham

Content Harborgrid grew out of sitting with UK product teams who could already draw a retention curve and still could not say, in a sentence, why Wednesday’s listeners vanished. The work is still that sentence: a human reading of churn risk, written in the vocabulary of the app itself.

We keep a room at Office 11, 19 Sample Avenue, Birmingham ZZ3 3AB. Much of the reading happens on a shared screen, but the office is where we print cancel-flow screenshots and mark them with pencil. Birmingham is a practical city for this: teams travel in from the Midlands without treating the visit as a London performance.

How we work

An engagement is led by one analyst. They read tickets in the order they arrived, not in a dashboard roll-up. They sit with whoever answers the leave questions on the help desk. They treat a billing anniversary as a calendar fact, not a “lifecycle stage.”

We do not claim a proprietary method. The method is patience with messy traces and a refusal to rename a silent lapse as “engagement.”

People

Mara Ellison trained in mixed-methods research and spent years inside a membership app’s success team before writing memos for other products. She leads most consumer diagnostics.

Owen Hale came from billing operations at a B2B workspace product. He is the person who notices when a “churn spike” is an invoice retry wearing a costume.

Priya Nair handles pre-launch readiness reviews. She used to write empty states and now reads them for the ways they invite people to stop.

Portraits below are the three of them in ordinary working clothes, not a staged lab.

Values we will actually keep

We will say when the evidence is thin. We will not invent a number to make a slide feel finished. We will not present the brand as a machine that “owns retention.” Clients keep their own charts; we keep the memo.