Notes from teams we sat with

These are not store ratings. They are notes from product owners who hired a retention study, a reading session, or interviews — including the parts that felt slow.

“They showed us that our ‘loyal’ weekly shoppers were actually a thin slice, and that most people vanished after a failed substitution. The write-up was slower than I wanted, but the interviews made the delay worthwhile.”
Farah Ismail — grocery app, Petaling Jaya · Retention Study

We booked a cohort reading because the board kept asking for a single return percentage. Wei Ming spent the first hour refusing to average week twelve with week two. That irritated two people in the room. It also stopped us presenting a number that would have been dishonest by Hari Raya week.
Daniel Chong — regional operations, ride-hailing · Cohort reading session

Priya interviewed members who had not opened the app since Deepavali. One woman described waiting for a Tamil-language brief that never arrived; we had treated language as a setting, not a reason to return. The notes were short. They were specific enough to change the next editorial calendar.
Kavitha Menon — daily news app · Lapsed-user interviews

A longer note: community forum, Penang-founded, KL office

The product team believed return rates fell because notifications had been turned down. The Retention Study rebuilt weekly cohorts from January through the following Chinese New Year. The steep drop sat in week one, among people who never completed a profile prompt that asked for a housing estate. Many lived in condos that were not on the list; they closed the app and did not reopen it.

Interviews confirmed the estate list, not the notification volume, as the first failure. The findings workshop was restless — engineering wanted a tracking fix; community managers wanted the list rewritten by hand. Both happened. We were not in the room for the rewrite. Six weeks later they sent a short letter: week-four return among new sign-ups had lifted, though they were careful not to call it a permanent change.

We include this because it shows the grain of the work: a form field, a festive calendar, and a disagreement about who owns the fix. That is what a retention study is for.