Product/Customer Journeys

Customer Journeys + Cohort ExplorationProduct outcomes

The aggregate moved. These are the people who moved it.

A percentage point of retention is a number. The accounts behind it are a list you can act on — if the customer is defined the same way in every system.

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ONE PERSON, SIX SYSTEMS

Commerce ordersCRM accountSupport ticketsEmail engagementWeb sessionsSubscription state

RESOLVED TO ONE GRAIN

Person-level identityMatched on 3 keys

Activity timeline1,412 events

CohortFirst purchase month

SegmentAPPROVED DEFINITION

01 / The gap

Aggregates hide the decision.

A dashboard can tell you retention fell. It cannot tell you which accounts to call this week, or whether they have anything in common.

The number is right, the action is missing

The metric is trustworthy and completely unusable. Nobody knows which customers it refers to.

Each system has its own customer

Commerce has an email, CRM has an account, support has a contact. None of them agree, so none of them join.

The list goes stale on export

A one-off CSV answers the question once. Next month somebody rebuilds it slightly differently.

02 / What Polyform builds

One definition of the customer, reused everywhere.

Activity Schema

One timeline per customer

Every meaningful thing a customer did, in one grain, so a new question does not need a new join.

Started trial12 Jan

First purchase19 Jan

Support escalation02 Mar

Lapsed14 Jun

ReturnedREACTIVATION · 31 JUL

Seen in the product

From the aggregate to the account.

The path from a percentage point to a list of people, and then to an action.

Northlane customer list — The accounts behind the number
A person-level list resolved across systems, scoped by the approved customer definition.

Northlane customer journey — What actually happened to one of them
Signup, purchase, support escalation, lapse, return — in order, from one activity model.

Northlane cohort definition — A reusable audience, not a CSV
The cohort is a defined object with an owner, so next month it still means the same thing.

Northlane cohort delivery — The list leaves the analysis
The same definition that produced the analysis drives the CRM segment or the task queue.

03 / What you can do with it

A cohort is only useful if it can leave the page.

The same definition that produced the analysis drives the action — so the list the team works is the list the report counted.

Investigate

Why this cohort

Compare cohortsIsolate the driverTrace to source activity

Act

Where it goes

CRM segmentLifecycle campaignCustomer-success task queueReactivation workflow

Keep

Why it stays true

Definition owned and reviewedFreshness monitoredRepair has an owner

Cohorts

Build a segment, then follow it through a pathway.

A cohort is a saved object with an owner, not a filter somebody remembers.

Segments

Build the population

Any combination of activities, attributes, and windows — saved, named, and reusable rather than rebuilt each time.

Pathways

A → B → C conversion

Define a sequence of steps and see conversion between each one, so you can find where the population actually falls out.

Single customer

The whole journey

Open any individual and see their complete activity across the product, in order, from the same model the cohort was built on.

Take it away

Download or analyse

Export the list, keep analysing it in place, or hand it to a workflow. It is the same population either way.

Datasets

The tables everything else is built on.

Primarily a data-expert tool — but available to everyone, because the definitions in it are what the rest of the system reuses.

Two ways to build

SQL or activity-based

Write the SQL, or compose it from modelled activities. Both produce the same kind of governed, reusable object.

Self-healing

Reconciles when things change

When an upstream definition or source changes, the dataset reconciles rather than silently drifting or breaking downstream.

Layered

Parent and child structure

Build a base dataset once and layer narrower children on top, so a change to the parent flows through instead of being copied.

Next step

Bring the aggregate you cannot act on.

One question, one cohort, one action the team can take on Monday.

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Turn the cohort into a recurring actionWorkflows Where the customer definition livesBusiness Context for AI Customer work already completedExamples