Acquisition was growing. Revenue wasn't.

The obvious answer was to improve retention campaigns and send more communication before renewal or cancellation.

But by the time somebody was cancelling, the real problem had often started much earlier.

I spoke to customers who had churned and looked at the lifecycle from signup onward.

The pattern was not simply price or competition. Onboarding, support and value realization mattered. Product usage often started changing before cancellation became visible.

Because switching friction was low, waiting for a cancellation signal was waiting too long.

I designed a customer information and intervention system around the lifecycle rather than around cancellation.

It connected documentation, automated onboarding communication, product usage tracking and an internal dashboard.

We tracked signals such as signup, logins, usage frequency, time in product, important feature usage and changes relative to each customer's normal behaviour.

The system was built to tell people when intervention was needed.

Support, account management, customer success and sales could see when an account was moving away from its own normal pattern and act before the risk became a cancellation.

Email was only one delivery mechanism. The real product was the information and intervention system behind it.

I designed the system and led the implementation.

I was hands-on with dashboard logic, tracking, automation design and system behaviour. Developers implemented significant parts of the database, backend and application layer.

The technology included React, Java, shell scripts, PostgreSQL, Gmail API integration, internal automation and product usage tracking.

The result was not a single retention campaign. It was a different way of operating around customer risk.

The business could see change earlier and intervene while there was still something useful to do.