A seven-person product pod at a multi-service app joined Studio Seat with a home dashboard that opened on daily active users, session length, and a rainbow of funnel steps. Leadership meetings routinely skipped the dashboard and opened a spreadsheet someone had built the night before.
In the decision-inventory module they listed the actual arguments: Are riders finishing the job they opened the app to do? Is support volume a product failure or an ops failure? Is a new vertical stealing attention from the profitable one?
They cut the first screen to three panels and renamed the north star “unfinished errands.” Retention moved to page two. Elena Voss, sitting as guest critic, asked them to add a single annotation field so a PM could leave a sentence for next week’s reader. That field is still there eight months later.
They did not hire us afterwards. They sent a second PM to the next cohort.