Journal · November 2025
Cohort funnels are not user journeys
A cohort funnel answers “of the people we labelled in week four, what share fired event B after event A.” A journey, in our studio sense, is a reconstructed route with retreats, OS dialogs, and time gaps. Translating one into the other mid-sentence is how Path Analysis for App Users gets a bad name.
We keep both on the table. The funnel is a budget instrument. The journey is a diagnostic. When a director asks “what do users do”, the honest first reply is “which users, labelled how, and over what clock.”
Alumni often report that the guest critique in User Path Mapping Studio is where this distinction finally sticks. An engineer will accept a funnel target and still demand a path sketch before changing an event. That is a healthy split of labour.
If your organisation only has time for one artefact this quarter, pick the event contract. Journeys built on a single “interaction” event are theatre.