#274 Your Data Platform is a Product, Treat it Like One! - Interview w/ Sean Gustafson

Please Rate and Review us on your podcast app of choice!Get involved with Data Mesh Understanding's free community roundtables and introductions: https://landing.datameshunderstanding.com/If you want to be a guest or give feedback (suggestions for topics, comments, etc.), please see hereEpisode list and links to all available episode transcripts here.Provided as a free resource by Data Mesh Understanding. Get in touch with Scott on LinkedIn.Transcript for this episode (link) provided by Starburst. You can download their Data Products for Dummies e-book (info-gated) here and their Data Mesh for Dummies e-book (info gated) here.Sean's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seangustafson/In this episode, Scott interviewed Sean Gustafson, Director of the Data Platform at Delivery Hero.Delivery Hero has been on the data mesh journey for longer than most organizations, at least over 3 years.Some key takeaways/thoughts from Sean's point of view:It's extremely hard but still important to try to impact your culture through things like your data platform. Who are you trying to make information available to? How do you make it accessible? How do you make data ownership easier?A key role of the data platform is that golden/easy path. Showing people easy ways to accomplish what they need with data products. Embed best practices into the platform when possible.You need a product manager in your data platform team. It's easy-ish to build cool things in data but understanding and building to user needs is harder and a must. Treat your data platform as a product!Relatedly, there isn't anything all that special about product management around the data platform. You can take what we've learned from other disciplines - especially software - and tweak it a bit for data. But it's not some arcane art.Focus on KPIs around what you are building and why, especially for your data platform. It's very hard to measure developer productivity but that doesn't mean you just don't measure it.?Controversial?: Be prepared to deal with a lot of qualitative data when measuring success around your data platform. Surveys work far better than most might think.Good product managers balance the short and long-term. You don't want to make drastic and breaking changes to your data platform often but that doesn't mean you can't take bigger bets and shake things up. Just balance iterative improvements and the bigger picture. Scott note: Zhamak talks about Thomas Kuhn and cumulative progress versus paradigm shiftsIn the same vein, make small bets where small bets will do but don't be afraid to make big bets when necessary.?Controversial?: It...