Product-thinking is making a big impact in the data world with the rise of Data Products, Data Product Managers, data mesh, and treating “Data as a Product.” But Honest, No-BS: What is a Data Product? And what key questions should we ask ourselves while developing them? Tim Gasper (VP of Product, data.world), will walk through the Data Product ABCs as a way to make treating data as a product way simpler: Accountability, Boundaries, Contracts and Expectations, Downstream Consumers, and Explicit Knowledge.

1. The Data Product ABCs
Tim Gasper
VP of Product, data.world +
Co-host of Catalog & Cocktails

2. Who am I to talk
● VP of Product at data.world (modern catalog,
governance, query, and knowledge graph platform)
● Former Head of Data and Analytics offerings at CSC
(now DXC Technologies)
● Rackspace (cloud data & analytics), Bitfusion (ML/AI
training), Janrain (customer identity & analytics),
Keepstream (social media analytics)
● 15+ years of product management and product
marketing experience across software, SaaS, and AI
and analytics products
● Speaker and writer on data, AI, product, and startups
● and…
@timgasper
/in/timgasper
timgasper.com

3. An honest, no BS data podcast.
Honest, no-BS, non-salesy conversation about
enterprise data management and analytics.
It’s a 60-minute podcast elixir containing everything
interesting about data and metadata management,
DataOps, knowledge graphs, and more.
4.8
Top 2.5% of Global Podcast Listenership*
*Listennotes.com

4. CONFIDENTIAL
● https://www.dataversity.ne
t/podcasts/
● https://www.dataversity.ne
t/my-career-in-data-
episode-4-tim-gasper-juan-
sequeda-of-data-world/
● https://www.youtube.com
/watch?v=Nu6LAEczg7U

5. datadotworld data.world
Highest adoption in the industry
● UX perfected with >1.8M users
● Data-driven UI and metadata model
● Catalog anything
● 1K+ releases a year, instant upgrades
● Federated data access in-platform
100% would recommend
(last 12 months)
datadotworld data.world
The enterprise data catalog for the modern data stack
powered by a knowledge graph

6. datadotworld data.world
100% would recommend
(last 12 months)
datadotworld data.world
The enterprise data catalog for the modern data stack
powered by a knowledge graph

7. Why all the Data Mesh buzz?
What is the problem?
Monolithic data infrastructures
don’t scale socially
Data is treated as an afterthought
Why do we care?
Centralized platforms and teams become a
bottleneck for the business
Data value is being left untapped

8. datadotworld data.world
Data Mesh
01
02
03
04
Domain Ownership
Empower the folks that create and know
the data best to manage it.
Data as a Product
Managing data with end users and
stakeholders in mind.
Federated computational
governance
Facilitate shared safety, interoperability,
and enablement.
Self-serve data
infrastructure as a
platform
Data catalog & governance
Data collection & integration
Data storage & compute
Data transformation & modeling
Business intelligence & analytics
Data observability

9. CONFIDENTIAL
Consuming data to solve the crucial
business problems should be as easy
as buying a product on your
favorite e-commerce platform.
How? Follow our ABCs!
Takeaway

10. datadotworld data.world
Data Product ABCs Accountability
Boundaries
Contracts & Expectations
Downstream Consumers
Explicit Knowledge

11. datadotworld data.world
Accountability
● Who is the owner/trustee/ambassador that is
responsible for the data?
● Who defines the requirements?
● Who fixes it when it breaks?
● Who is on call?
● Who is in trouble if the data is mishandled?

12. CONFIDENTIAL
STRATEGIC TEAM
Who is playing what roles?
The Cloud-Native Data Catalog
CONSUMERS PRODUCERS
Technical architect Project manager
Program manager
Executive
Data steward Data engineer
Data analyst/scientist
Business decision maker
datadotworld data.world
The Cloud-Native Data Catalog datadotworld data.world
Data product manager

13. datadotworld data.world
Boundaries
● What is the data?
● What isn’t it?
● Where will it live?
● How is it accessed?
● What are the inputs and outputs?
● How do you balance that roadmap against other
organizational priorities and considerations?

14. datadotworld data.world
Contracts & Expectations
● What are the data constraints, definitions, and
tests?
● What are the SLAs and SLOs?
● What are the sharing agreements, consented
uses, and policies?
● What are the consented purposes?
● What is the performance and scale?
● What are the quality and maintainability details?
● What is security? Who can see it?

15. datadotworld data.world
Downstream Consumers
● Who are the current consumers?
● Who are potential consumers?
● What are the use cases that have been
considered?
● What is the value?
● What is the roadmap of the data product?
● How will it evolve to provide more value for
consumers over time?
● What is the user experience of the data? APIs,
shape, access point?

16. datadotworld data.world
Explicit Knowledge
● What is the meaning?
● What is the schema/ontology?
● How is it related to other data products?
● Where is the documentation with examples?

17. datadotworld data.world
User Data Product
Accountability ● The Product domain is responsible
● Technical Steward if something goes wrong with the data pipeline is Alice.
● Business Steward if there are questions about the meaning of the data is Bob.
● The Data Product Manager who is gathering the requirements and managing the roadmap is: Charlene.
Boundaries ● This will contain data about users starting from Jan 1, 2022. Users are defined as people who has activated their account.
● This data product will live in our cloud data warehouse.
Contracts &
Expectations
● This data product will have a list of all the users. It will contain the unique internal id, date created, ...
● All the data should be complete, in other words, there is no reason for missing data.
● This is the definitive number of users.
● This data product is near real time. With up to a 1 hour lag.
● This can only be used for internal company purposes. If any of this data, including aggregated, needs to be shared outside of
the company, the data product manager needs to be consulted.
● Data is available in our cloud data warehouse, therefore it can be accessed by SQL or through our BI tool.
Downstream
Consumers
● The customer success team is the main consumer of the data. The marketing and sales team can use this data for upsell and
cross sell. Marketing team wants to use this for personalized offers, but that is not yet a target use case. Next year roadmap.
● Depending on requirements, more attributes about the users can be added, if they are already captured.
● The customer success team wants to interact with the data through a BI tool.
Explicit
Knowledge
● A user is any person who has signed up for our system starting on Jan 1, 2022 and that they have activated the account. The
schema consists of …
● A user can be associated with exactly 1 email, …
● The User data product can be joined with the User Activity data product.

18. datadotworld data.world
Agile Data Governance process: iterate!
datadotworld data.world
The Cloud Data Catalog datadotworld data.world
The Cloud-Native Data Catalog

19. datadotworld data.world
The time impact of being fast, incremental, and iterative
Define policies
Release
Build workflows
Define standards and principles
Data Product 1
Evolve policies
Release
Build workflows
Evolve standards/principles
Analysis, Insight, Value
Measure, Learn, Iterate
Data Product 2
Evolve policies
Release
Build workflows
Evolve standards/principles
Analysis, Insight, Value
Measure, Learn, Iterate
Data Product 3
Evolve policies
Release
Build workflows
Evolve standards/principles
Analysis, Insight, Value
Measure, Learn, Iterate
Data Product 4
Evolve policies
Release
Build workflows
Evolve standards/principles
Analysis, Insight, Value
Measure, Learn, Iterate
datadotworld data.world
The Cloud Data Catalog datadotworld data.world
The Cloud-Native Data Catalog

20. datadotworld data.world
What are the metrics?
● How many of your employees are searching for
data on a regular basis?
● How many of your employees are doing self
service analysis with the data?
● How many data apps are being built to change
the way the business runs?
● What are the adoption rates of your data
catalog, self service analytics and BI tools?
● What are the most common types of data that
employees are using to deliver business impact?
● Do you have a data community and how many
people are active in it?

21. datadotworld data.world
Takeaways
Consuming data to solve the
crucial business problems
should be as easy as buying a
product on your favorite e-
commerce platform.
Focus on Accountability,
Boundaries, Contracts &
Expectations, Downstream
Consumers, and Explicit
Knowledge.
Leverage the best
practices of agile
software development to
create and manage your
data products.

22. Learn more about data mesh governance
What’s inside?
How to…
● Establish a framework for treating data as a product
● Find the right balance of decentralization and centralization
● Transform data into knowledge
Download it here:
data.world/resources/reports-and-tools/data-mesh-governance-white-paper
datadotworld data.world
The Cloud Data Catalog datadotworld data.world

23. An honest, no BS data podcast.
Honest, no-BS, non-salesy conversation about
enterprise data management and analytics.
It’s a 60-minute podcast elixir containing everything
interesting about data and metadata management,
DataOps, knowledge graphs, and more.
4.8
Top 2.5% of Global Podcast Listenership*
*Listennotes.com