1. Traces, not averages
You bring a week of anonymised events. We separate cart-icon bounce from payment-sheet stall, and we throw out metrics that treat a cancelled sheet as a successful “checkout start”.
Flagship programme
Native Checkout Recovery Studio
For teams who already ship an app storefront and can see that Checkout Abandonment in Apps is not a homepage problem. You will leave with instrumented events, rewritten recovery states, and a sequenced backlog—not a slide about “optimising conversion”.
What you should be able to do afterwards
- Draw a sheet-level funnel that distinguishes “opened wallet”, “token received”, and “order confirmed” on iOS and Android.
- Specify cart persistence that survives backgrounding without forcing an account on every guest.
- Write error and recovery copy that names the failure (wallet, 3-DS, timeout) instead of accusing the shopper of leaving.
- Rank engineering work by stall frequency, not by how easy the ticket looks in Jira.
Modules
2. Wallet order and silent failure
Apple Pay, Google Pay, and card entry are not interchangeable buttons. This module covers presentation order, fallback when a wallet returns nothing, and why a 200 from your API can still mean the shopper saw a blank sheet.
3. The bank-app hop
3-D Secure and open-banking hops kill processes. You design restore paths, including what happens if the hop succeeds but your app never hears it.
4. Guest identity without a wall
How much you can infer from a wallet, when email capture belongs after pay, and the legal notes GB teams keep asking for in class (we are not your solicitor).
5. Recovery surfaces
Push, inbox, and in-app banners after a stall. You draft three states: wallet fail, timeout, and “paid but unconfirmed”. Marketing templates from web checkout are treated as hostile examples.
6. Sequencing the backlog
A working session where each team pins five tickets with owners. We refuse to “prioritise everything”. The limitation is deliberate: if your organisation cannot assign owners, the studio will not pretend a roadmap appeared.
Instructor
Helen Crowe spent a decade on mobile payments at two UK retailers before teaching full time from Forth. She still reviews traces with each cohort and will tell you when a leak is a PSP issue you cannot design around.
Informational fee
£1,480 per seat for the six-week studio, invoiced after we confirm a place by email. Teams of three or more are listed on the fees page under Cohort Bench. This website does not collect payment.
Questions we hear before week one
Do we need native engineers in the room?
Yes for modules 2 and 3. A PM-only seat will understand the map but cannot complete the persistence lab without someone who can speak to local storage and process death.
Will you look at our live app?
We look at events and recordings you are allowed to share. We do not get App Store credentials or production admin access. If your traces are a mess, week one is spent cleaning definitions, which eats into later modules.
What is the real limitation of this studio?
We do not run your PSP relationship or rewrite your backend authorisation flow. If declines sit with the acquirer, the studio will show you how to surface that honestly; it will not make the bank say yes. Teams hoping for a secret copy tweak that doubles completion usually leave disappointed, and that is fair.
Is there a certificate?
A letter of completion on request. Hiring managers in GB rarely ask for it; they ask what you changed in the sheet. Bring the backlog from module 6 to that conversation.
Helen’s bank-app hop diagrams matched the crashes we had filed as “random Android”. We still have not solved process death on older devices, but we stopped blaming “user rage taps”.
★★★☆☆
Useful on guest paths. I wanted more on subscriptions and trial-to-paid inside the same app. The recovery copy workshop was the piece I reused the next Monday.