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Omnibus
200 skills · 1230 min
Omnibus
Skill 98 of 200
Build reusable product-usage and engagement models — retention, stickiness, and lifecycle — on either PostHog data-warehouse views (HogQL) or an external dbt project.
2 minutes · 348 words · 5 sections
Install
npx skills add PostHog/skills --skill modeling-product-usage-metricsnpx skills add PostHog/skills/plugin marketplace add PostHog/skillsThe first command installs just this skill, by the name in its SKILL.md; the second installs the whole repository.
Retention, stickiness, and lifecycle answer three different questions about the same event stream. Model them
together. Read modeling-warehouse-foundations first. Definitions:
references/usage-metric-definitions.md (opens in a new tab); recipes in
references/posthog/ (opens in a new tab) and references/dbt/ (opens in a new tab).
| Lens | Question | Output | Model when |
|---|---|---|---|
| Retention | Do users come back? | Cohort matrix: entry period × intervals-later × % retained | Measuring churn / stickiness of the core action over time. |
| Stickiness | How often do they engage? | Distribution: users by # of active intervals | Finding power users, feature stickiness, DAU/WAU/MAU shape. |
| Lifecycle | Is growth healthy? | Per interval: new / returning / resurrecting / dormant | Judging growth quality, spotting a leaky bucket. |
All three key off one chosen event/action, an interval (day/week/month), and an aggregation unit (person or group). Fix those three, then pick the lens.
$pageview and retention of your core value action tell
very different stories. Model the action that means “got value”, not just “opened the app”.view-create. See foundations references/governance.md.PostHog: HogQL recipes mirroring the built-in insights, so the model reuses the same logic in SQL and
downstream views:
references/posthog/retention_matrix.sql (opens in a new tab),
stickiness.sql (opens in a new tab),
lifecycle.sql (opens in a new tab). For quick interactive analysis prefer the native
query-retention / query-stickiness / query-lifecycle tools; build views when the metric must be reused
or joined (e.g. by modeling-activation-metrics).
dbt: fct_retention, fct_stickiness, fct_lifecycle marts + tests. Recipes:
references/dbt/ (opens in a new tab).
| File | Read when |
|---|---|
references/usage-metric-definitions.md (opens in a new tab) | Precise definitions of retention, stickiness, lifecycle buckets. |
references/posthog/ (opens in a new tab) | HogQL recipes for each lens. |
references/dbt/ (opens in a new tab) | dbt fct_retention / fct_stickiness / fct_lifecycle + tests. |
modeling-warehouse-foundations (mechanics), query-retention / query-stickiness / query-lifecycle +
querying-posthog-data (interactive analysis + HogQL), modeling-activation-metrics (uses retention lift),
modeling-dimension-tables (breakdown dimensions).
Build reusable product-usage and engagement models — retention, stickiness, and lifecycle — on either PostHog data-warehouse views (HogQL) or an external dbt project. Use when the user wants to model, define, or compute whether users come back (retention / churn), how frequently they engage (stickiness / power users / DAU-WAU-MAU ratio), or the composition of the active base (new / returning / resurrecting / dormant lifecycle). These three are one engagement family sharing a start-event/return-event vocabulary and an interval granularity; this skill treats them together and helps pick the right lens: retention for the return-rate cohort matrix, stickiness for the frequency distribution, lifecycle for growth quality. On PostHog, model them in HogQL (mirroring query-retention / query-stickiness / query-lifecycle); in dbt, build fct_retention / fct_stickiness / fct_lifecycle marts with tests. Read modeling-warehouse-foundations first; feeds the retention validation used by modeling-activation-metrics.
The verbatim description from this skill’s front matter — the string an agent matches on to decide whether to load it.
main, last pushed 24 September 2026.SKILL.md, not by matching a directory convention. 2 distinct layouts observed: skills/omnibus/*/SKILL.md, skills/posthog/all/skills/*/SKILL.md.h1 and no skipped levels:.claude-plugin/marketplace.json by PostHog, declaring 6 plugins. It is read for editorial metadata only — never as the skill index, which is always the repository tree./PostHog/skills.md, and each skill at its own .md URL.8 files · 9 KB
Everything this skill ships beside its prose. All of it is set here, as subchapters of skill 98.
Documentation the agent loads on demand, rather than up front.