Product teams love a three-step funnel for first-run. Step one: install. Step two: account. Step three: “activation.” The chart is tidy. The product is not. People skip, retry, open from an email, fail a document upload, and come back tomorrow with a different device. A corridor cannot represent that. A map can.
In Event Cartography we ask students to draw onboarding as terrain: paths, dead ends, and places where two jobs share a clearing. App Analytics then has to name those places so they can fail independently. If “step two” bundles permission prompts, identity, and a paywall, you will never know which hill people died on.
Dead ends are first-class
Instrument the refusal. A declined camera permission is not the absence of a success event; it is a place. So is an expired magic link. So is a KYC provider timeout. Teams avoid these events because they feel like admitting friction. The opposite is true. Without them, success rates become mystical.
The fintech case in our reviews split a single “continue” into document-upload versus affordability-check. The drop was a retry firing as success. Geography made the lie visible. A corridor would have kept congratulating itself.
Activation is a claim, not a metric
Pick the first job you are willing to defend as “they got it,” and put it on the map as a named finish line. Everything after that is a different region: habit, expansion, billing. Mixing them produces a single percentage that executives like and operators cannot act on.
If your current first-run chart is a corridor, redraw it on paper before you open the vendor. Then come to the Signal Atlas and see which layer you skipped. The sitting that rebuilds the names is Event Cartography.