journal
Short pieces from the practice: the week between last useful session and cancel, the words people use on a leave screen, and why a billing dip is not always a leaving.
Cancel is paperwork. The leaving usually happened earlier, in a week when the app was still installed and no longer useful.
In membership apps we see it after a failed “aha” that nobody named: a teacher who could not export, a runner whose GPS drift ruined a Sunday, a family calendar that double-booked. The event log still shows opens. The tickets, if you keep them, start using past tense.
A cancel flow is a conversation the product is having while pretending not to. The buttons are arguments: stay for a discount, pause, skip a month, confirm leave.
We interview two people if we can: whoever last edited those buttons, and whoever answers the chat when the buttons fail. The first person talks about experiments. The second person quotes verbs from users: “I only wanted to pause,” “it charged my partner,” “the export never came.”
The anniversary of a Direct Debit is a calendar event. It is also where finance and product start using the word churn for different piles.
A failed mandate that retries for two weeks is not a person who left. A person who left on the anniversary after a month of unused sessions is not a payments problem. Mixing them makes the cohort week look haunted.
Event names are a dialect the product taught itself. “onboarding_step_4_complete” can mean a person finished a tutorial or a person mashed the only button that dismissed a modal.
Tickets are messy and they contain verbs. “Couldn’t share the list with my sister” will not appear as an event until someone decides to log shares. By then, several sisters have already left.