DEV Community: Mary Jonah

Finding product usage interval and mapping retention type for a meditation app

Mary Jonah — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 13:26:51 +0000

I came across Amplitude's Mastering Retention Playbook and I have been hooked ever since.
More often than not when we want to increase revenue for our digital products, we concentrate on increasing the number of new customers for our products, but the playbook reminds us there are 2 other groups we should include:

Current users becoming power users (so they spend more)
Dormant users (users who are no longer using the product) rather than focus on our current users and those who were once users.

This article starts from basics; it covers details from Chapter 1 up through to Chapter 3.1. I hope this serves as a practical resource for anyone who picks up the material. At the end of the article, my expectations are you would be able to explain:

Calculate the average number of times a typical user uses your application (performs a transaction on an ecommerce store, plays game, completes a meditation session, comments/like/share for a media mobile app or website)?
How to measure retention in multiple ways for your product.

Here I use a fictional mobile application called Mindful Minutes to explain the terms: *Critical Event, Product Usage Interval and talk about the 3 ways to measure retention

Critical Event

Company	Expected interaction with company's product
Youtube	Watch content
Amazon	Buy products
IC Wealth	Buy Ghanaian stocks
Instagram	Post content, like, comment

The interactions above are called critical events. These are the core actions which the various companies expect the bulk of their customers to undertake. Anything outside these is fine but they may not have a direct and positive relationship with revenue for the company.

Critical Event for Mindful Minutes

We want users to complete a meditation session. Hence that is our critical event. The more users complete this, the more money we make.

Product Usage Interval

This relates to how frequent users interact with the application. There are general expectations for apps: daily (social media, weather apps), weekly (e-commerce [could be daily for some users]), monthly (an application for tax or payroll purposes).
But the fact that your product s categorized under social media does not necessarily mean by default your product usage interval is daily. You need to calculate this for yourself.

Product Usage Interval for Mindful Minutes

From our data, most of our users use the app on a *weekly * basis (not excited to hear this but wait this is why we are reading this playbook to move it to daily)

3 ways of measuring retention

It may surprise you to know that there are multiple ways as mentioned in the Playbook.

N-Day (week/month) Retention:
This type calculates the percentage of users who performed the critical event on a specific day. This measure informs you how many of your users returned on say 3 days after performing the critical event.
Unbounded Retention:
The difference between this and the N-Day retention measure is this value informs you of how many users performed the critical event on the specific day and over. So, if you have 30% Unbounded retention on Day 7, then 30% of users meditated on the 8th day and the days after when they completed their first session.

1-Week Retention vs Weekly Unbounded Retention for the Mindful Minutes app

How to read the graph?

N-Week Retention Curve: 8.64% of users came back on exactly 1 week after their first completed meditation session
Unbounded Retention: 31.96% of users came back after their first week and the weeks there after

Bracket Retention: There are some applications that are used infrequently. As an example: a university build a portal where students can view their transcript. There can be varying arguments that it fits the N-day measure but I think it is infrequent. More students will take a look at it during vacation or when school resumes. So why not group these days/weeks/months and then capture your retention within this period. This explains how bracket retention is calculated.

Bracket Retention using 3 week bands for Mindful Minutes

There you have it, my take on Chapter 1 through to Chapter 3.1 of Mastering Retention Playbook by Amplitude

Go through it, share your thoughts, I am excited to read them and let me know where I falter so I can correct

Should We Even Have a Summer Sale? A Data-Driven Debate 🌞

Mary Jonah — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 07:50:43 +0000

Summer is just around the corner, count down in less than 2 weeks and by now, most companies are already out with good deals on their products. Unfortunately, my fictional company was dealing with other issues, so they are now in action and are hurriedly preparing to slash prices of their products for their customers.

The Marketing Department is excited about this, and the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) wants the plan completed by end of week. During the first meeting of the team setup to draw the plan, the senior data analyst was asked "Which category of products should we concentrate on based on the sales data your team has collected?".

He answered, "Should we have the summer sale in the first place?". "Because because", muttered the CMO.
"Let me share a simple analysis of revenue grouped by seasons for 2024 and 2023", the analyst said in response to his own question.

"Gross Merchandise Volume is at the highest during the Summer for the past 2 years. Should we not rather boost sales in other seasons?"

"But we will be the only company without a sale, how do you think we will be perceived in the eyes of the public: a company that does only wants money", the CMO interrupted the analyst. "Last quarter financials, showed that a third of our customers purchased more than once within that period."

The story of "liquid gold" from 3 oil fields in Ghana.

Mary Jonah — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 10:02:33 +0000

Still in the 2025 Ghanaian budget, it had a section that highlighted Crude oil production from January up till 25th September 2025. Data from 3 oil fields Jubilee, TEN (Tweneboa Enyenra Ntomme), and SGN (Sankofa-Gye Nyame) captured in Table 8 included:

Daily average production (in barrels)
Number of production days in the month
Quantity for the month (Daily average production x Number of production days)

What I like

Table with all the data needed to come up with visualizations.

What will I change?

Create 2 visualizations:
- Line graphs which show the total quantity (in millions of barrels of crude oil) produced per month from each field.
- Small multiples of line graphs which shows the average production per day for each oilfield.

Before

After
Total output from all 3 oilfields

Average production from each oilfield

Tools: Excel
References:

When things fell into right places

Mary Jonah — Thu, 28 May 2026 06:59:31 +0000

In the 2025 Annual Inflation Report, there was a happy story in 'bars' that needed to be told.

What I like:

Data labels so one can use it in recreating the chart.
Legend was at the top (was eliminated but this is better than most diagrams leaving them in the default position which is beneath the chart)

What will I change?

Axis titles:
- y-axis title: Include "Inflation" title and % to communicate the values are percentages.
- x-axis title: 2025 moved to be an x-axis title as the data spans the same year no need to include it in each month
Highlight the drastic drop in May - June
- Capture that as the story in the title
- Match the background colour of the title with the line between May and June.
- Include the inflation details for these months for both categories
Include the series titles directly on the lines.
Provide details of story as a description beneath the title.
End with the inflation numbers for both series at the end of the year with minimal emphasis on them.

Before:

After:

Tools: Excel
References:
- FIGURE 2.2: GOODS VS SERVICES INFLATION (% YOY), JAN.-DEC. 2025 - Annual Inflation Report (Page 21)
- Exchange Rate Details - Bank of Ghana
- Jan to Dec monthly gold prices - Stat Muse

Give us money and collecting from our citizens, Q1 - Q3 story of financing Ghana's expenditure in 2025

Mary Jonah — Thu, 28 May 2026 06:51:08 +0000

The initial diagram can be found under the section 2025 Q1-Q3 Budget Balances and Financing Operations in the 2025 Budget Statement and Economic Policy.

Here my presentation is about informing the citizens about meeting financing goals from international and domestic sources.

What I like:

The figures in the diagram, there was no table with the figures, so I was able to recreate it using what I see in the diagram.

What will I change?

Both colors will be replaced with Dark Teal, Accent 1 and Orange to eliminate any bias or assumption associated with the existing colors.
The line and figures associated with the totals do not add extra details; they can be added in the text description.
Add block of text to provide more insights on title.
Replace Outturn with Actual, it is too technical for the audience I seek to communicate with.
Use slope graph and its slope to communicate the rate of change.
Replace the default legend with colour-coded text at the top of the graph.
Move the quarter information to the description instead of repeating in x-axis titles.
- Also bolden the text financing rather than repeating it in legend.
Left-align text all text to follow the default way humans read text from top-left to bottom-right.

Before:

After:

Tools: Excel
References:
- Evergreen Data - Make a Slopegraph in Excel
- Figure 6: Summary of Q1-Q3 2025 Financing Operations - 2026 Budget Statement (Page 24)

Introducing "Four-Eyed Insights 🤓"

Mary Jonah — Wed, 27 May 2026 06:42:58 +0000

Hi Everyone,

Welcome to Four-Eyed Insights, a play on the fact that I wear 2 extra 'eyes' in the form of spectacles👓.

This series will be a fun one, here I will be re-doing visuals I find complex so they can be easily understood by most people (my target is not the whole world).

Yes, there will be a before and after section (do not take it personal, everything here is my point of view, and opposing ideas are encouraged so share them in the comments section). I will also share my thought process.