Unified product analytics, GA4, Mixpanel, and warehouse bridge

An edtech platform, marketing used GA4, product used Mixpanel, finance used warehouse exports, reported three different activation numbers in the same leadership meeting. Board slides contradicted each other and experiment post-mortems stalled on definition debates.

Simplileap instrumentation plan: canonical event dictionary in Notion with owner per event; Segment-style taxonomy implemented via RudderStack; dbt models in Snowflake as source of truth; Looker dashboard for exec KPIs with footnotes on historical cutoff dates.

Technical implementation: server-side and client events normalized to snake_case schema; identity stitching across anonymous and logged-in states; consent-gated firing aligned to Consent Mode v2; JSON schema CI check on mobile app releases to prevent version skew.

Problems: legacy events fired pre-consent, Consent Mode alignment required GTM and app SDK changes; mobile app version skew, schema versioning with JSON schema CI check; Mixpanel historical data not backfillable, documented cutoff date in dashboard footnotes.

Monitoring: anomaly detection on daily signup funnel with PagerDuty to growth engineer on-call; weekly data quality report on null property rates.

Governance: no new event without dictionary entry and owner; quarterly taxonomy review with marketing, product, and finance stakeholders.

Outcome: single activation definition adopted in QBR; experiment analysis time down 40%; data team tickets on "which number is right" near zero. Edtech platform anonymized, reference call available under NDA.