Your Funnel Should Start With a Question, Not a Form

Funnels are supposed to help you answer simple questions. Where are users dropping off? Which step loses the most people? Did something change after a deployment?

But getting to those answers often starts with a completely different problem: building the funnel. You have to choose the events, define the steps, configure the journey, and make sure everything matches the way your application is already tracking users. By the time you've finished setting everything up, you haven't actually investigated the problem yet.

That's why we changed how funnel creation works in HeronSignal.

Instead of starting with a configuration form, you can start with the question you're trying to answer. HeronSignal looks at the events your workspace is already recording and uses them to build the funnel for you.

Start with what you want to understand

When you're investigating a product problem, you usually don't start by thinking about events. You think about what went wrong.

Maybe checkout conversion dropped. Maybe users are getting stuck during signup. Maybe people are starting a process but never completing it. The problem is usually clear before the exact events you need are.

So the new funnel experience starts with a simple question:

What do you want to understand?

You can describe the journey in your own words. For example:

  Why do people who start checkout never finish it?

HeronSignal then looks at the events already being recorded in your workspace and uses them to build the funnel.

Your events are already there

One of the unnecessary parts of building a funnel is having to think about the tracking implementation before you can analyze it. Your application is already generating events, whether that's checkout_started, checkout_completed, payment_failed, signup_started, or something specific to your product.

The new funnel workflow surfaces the events currently arriving in your workspace, so you can use what's already being recorded instead of starting from an empty configuration screen. This also makes it easier to discover what your application is actually tracking. Sometimes the problem isn't that you don't have the data. You just don't know which data you need yet.

Let HeronSignal build the funnel

Once you've described what you're trying to understand, HeronSignal can turn that question into a funnel using the events available in your workspace.

You don't have to start by deciding which event should be step one. You start with the journey you're trying to understand, and HeronSignal handles the initial configuration.

For example, if you're investigating checkout, you can ask:

  Why do people who start checkout never finish it?

Instead of spending time figuring out how to configure the analysis, you can get to the funnel and start looking at where the journey breaks down.

You still have control

AI shouldn't mean giving up control. If you already know exactly which events you want to use, you can still build the funnel yourself through Set the events myself.
The difference is that manual configuration is no longer the only way into the workflow. You can let HeronSignal build the initial funnel and adjust it, or skip the AI path entirely when you already know exactly what you want.
That gives you two ways to work: describe the problem and let HeronSignal handle the configuration, or configure everything yourself when you need more precision.

The point isn't to add another AI button

It's easy to put an AI button into an existing workflow and call it an AI feature. That's not really what we're trying to do.

The goal is to remove work that shouldn't have been necessary in the first place.

If your application is already recording the events, you shouldn't have to spend the first few minutes translating a business question into technical configuration before you can start investigating it. You should be able to describe what you're trying to understand and let the product help you get there.

From building funnels to answering questions

This change is part of a bigger direction for HeronSignal.

Traditional analytics tools often organize the experience around the tools themselves: Sessions, Funnels, Events, Metrics, Logs. But when something goes wrong, that's usually not how you think about the problem.

You don't think, "I need to use the funnel feature." You think, "Why did signups drop?" or "Where are users abandoning checkout?" or "Did yesterday's deployment affect conversion?"

Those questions might require several different pieces of production data, and the user shouldn't always have to figure out which feature to open first. The product should help connect the question to the right data.

A funnel tells you where. The investigation tells you why.

Finding the drop off is only the beginning. If a funnel shows that users are leaving between two steps, the next question is obvious: why are they leaving?
That's where the rest of HeronSignal becomes useful. You can move from the funnel into sessions, events, logs, and other production context to understand what happened to the users who dropped off. Maybe a request failed, a button didn't respond, users encountered an unexpected state, or something changed after a deployment.
The funnel tells you where the problem is. The rest of the investigation helps you understand why.

The workflow should follow the problem

This is the direction we're taking with HeronSignal. Instead of making users learn the platform before they can investigate a problem, we're trying to make the platform adapt to the problem they're already trying to solve.
The workflow becomes:
Question → Relevant data → Investigation → Root cause → Fix
rather than:
Choose a feature → Configure it → Find the information → Figure out what to do next
The change to funnel creation is one example of that approach. The goal is to make the product work more like the way engineers actually investigate problems.
Try it with your own data
If you're already recording events in HeronSignal, you can create a funnel by describing the journey you're trying to understand. Start with the question, let HeronSignal handle the initial configuration, and switch to manual configuration whenever you need more control.
What do you want to understand?
Try HeronSignal