Flagship programme
Send-Window Architecture
A twelve-week studio for people who already own a notification stack and need the clock to stop fighting the copy.
What you practise
We do not teach you how to write push copy. We teach you how to refuse a send that would be readable and still wrong. Each week you bring a live message family from your organisation — billing, onboarding, incident, or marketing — and leave with a window, a hold rule, and a named owner for exceptions.
Sessions run Tuesday mornings BST with a Thursday desk clinic. Recordings exist; the clinic does not. If you cannot attend the clinic at least eight times, wait for a later cohort.
Outcomes we will mark
A seven-day send map covering at least three message families. A quiet-hours policy that a solicitor could skim. A mute-rate review ritual that product cannot skip by renaming a campaign. A written limitation: we do not migrate your vendor, and we will not write SQL for your warehouse.
Modules
Civil time versus stored time
Why UTC in the job table is not a send policy, and how BST/GMT shifts break naive hour filters.
Message families
Splitting transactional, promotional, and incident traffic so they never share a default window.
Quiet Hours ledger
Building a suppression list that legal, support, and growth can all read without a slide deck.
Hold queues
Scoring a delayed send as a success. Ninety-minute holds, overnight holds, and bank-holiday holds.
Mute as a product event
Pairing disable graphs with windows. If mute climbs while opens look healthy, the window fails.
Timezone collapse drills
A fourteen-person squad pressing send from mixed offsets. Includes a mild failure case we keep on file.
Caps and one-off flags
How “just this once” bypasses destroy a cadence. We write the exception form that product hates and later thanks.
Review ritual
A monthly clock review that survives a reorg: artefacts, owners, and what we refuse to automate.
Tutor
Helen Okoye
Helen ran lifecycle operations for a payments firm in London before moving the teaching load to Davington. She still keeps a paper send map on the studio wall and will mark yours in red if “ASAP” appears as a window. She does not consult on copy, brand voice, or ESP migrations.
Questions we hear before week one
Do I need engineering in the room?
Someone who can change a job schedule must attend the Thursday clinic at least half the time. Product-only seats stall at module four when the hold queue needs an owner.
Will this work if our vendor has no native quiet hours?
Yes, with a limitation: you will design an external hold. We do not build that hold for you, and two recent cohorts left still waiting on a vendor ticket. The architecture can be right while the pipe is not.
Is there a certificate?
A studio letter naming the artefacts you submitted. It is not an accredited qualification and we will not imply otherwise on LinkedIn copy.
Can marketing and ops share a seat?
Two people may share recordings; only one may submit maps. We have tried dual marking. It doubled arguments and did not improve windows.
Notes from this programme
Module three forced us to write quiet hours in sentences a solicitor could skim. Support stopped inventing exceptions in Slack.
I still dislike the spreadsheet. It is clearer than the dashboard we had, which is a low bar and also the point.