Funnels that flatter the product
A funnel is a costume when any step can be skipped, deferred, or satisfied by a system event the user never chose. The chart still looks like a corridor. The product is a set of rooms with extra doors.
Mobile onboarding is the usual theatre. Notification permission, a “success” splash, a profile field nobody needs. Each step has an event. Together they produce a handsome drop-off that leadership can “work on” without asking whether the corridor should exist.
An afternoon test
Take the funnel you show in reviews. For each step, write “required for the job” or “required for the chart.” If more than one step is the latter, you are measuring obedience to instrumentation, not progress through the product.
Then watch five session recordings with the sound off — not as strategy, as illustration. Count how often a user reaches the alleged step by accident. If the count is not zero, the step is not a step.
What we do in the studio
Product Telemetry Studio asks you to retire one step on paper even if you cannot ship the change that week. The paper retirement is the curriculum. Shipping is your company’s problem, and we will not pretend a critique is a roadmap.
Funnels remain useful when every step is a decision the user would recognise. When they are not, a cohort on a single meaningful event is the more honest picture — less pretty, less flattering, more adult.