The Invisible Handoff

Two teams owned the player journey. Acquisition brought them in. Retention kept them playing. On paper, the handoff between the two was seamless.

On paper.

In reality, there was a gap. Not a large one -- maybe 48 hours where a newly deposited player belonged to nobody. Acquisition had hit their conversion target. Retention's engagement triggers hadn't kicked in yet. In that window, the player was orphaned.

The Collision

Nobody noticed for three quarters because the metrics on both sides looked healthy. Acquisition reported strong deposit rates. Retention reported solid day-30 numbers. But the players who churned in that 48-hour gap never appeared in either team's reporting.

They fell through a seam in the data.

When a new analyst finally stitched the two datasets together, the picture was jarring. Fourteen percent of first-time depositors were going inactive within the first week -- not because the product was bad, but because nobody was talking to them during the most critical window of their lifecycle.

The Cost

Each lost player in that window represented roughly $220 in expected lifetime value. At the volume this operator was running, the invisible handoff was bleeding over $400,000 per quarter.

Two teams. Both performing well by their own metrics. A gap between them where money disappeared quietly enough that neither team had reason to look.

The fix was straightforward: a shared 72-hour onboarding sequence that neither team owned alone. The hard part was getting two departments to admit that their individual success was masking a collective failure.