Permission prompts and phantom conversion cliffs
A step that never fires after a dialog invents drop-off product never caused.
A forty-percent cliff between adjacent funnel steps looks urgent in a Monday meeting. Sometimes it is real. Often the second step only fires after a notification or location prompt that half of users dismiss forever.
Before rewriting the flow, reproduce the path while watching the live stream. Note every silent miss. Ask whether the step is client-only, server-confirmed, or both.
Identity resets between web and app create similar ghosts: people who continue on a second device look like new entrants who abandoned mid-path.
Conversion Path Verification stays deliberately narrow—one path, deep QA, a checklist you can rerun after every release so the phantom does not return unnoticed.