Field notes
What to bring to a behavior audit kickoff
Access, a short list of critical flows, and one person who can explain why a feature exists. That trio saves a week of guessing.
A customer behavior audit moves faster when the first meeting includes more than polite introductions. We ask for three practical items before analysis begins.
First, read access to analytics exports or a warehouse extract covering the journeys in scope. Screenshots of dashboards help for orientation but cannot replace sequence-level data when we need to rebuild paths. Second, a written list of the three to five flows that matter most to the business this quarter—not every screen in the application. Third, a product owner who can explain the intended outcome of each flow when the data looks surprising.
Support ticket themes and recent release notes are useful companions. They do not replace the three items above. Without them, analysts spend early days reconstructing context that someone on the team already knows.
If tracking gaps appear during kickoff, say so early. An honest list of untracked steps is more valuable than a polished chart built on incomplete events. The audit can still proceed; it will simply mark where findings are provisional until instrumentation catches up.