Building Data Products

Chapter 3. Imagining a Data Product

A Note for Early Release Readers

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This will be the 3rd chapter of the final book. Please note that the GitHub repo will be made active later on.

If you’d like to be actively involved in reviewing and commenting on this draft, please reach out to the editor at [e-mail].

Imagine trying to describe a car to someone who’s only ever seen bicycles. That’s where we are with data products. We’re used to datasets, dashboards, maybe a pipeline or two, but the idea of a product built from data still feels fuzzy to many. In this chapter, you’ll explore what makes a data product a product, how to imagine and architect one, and how it fits into a larger system of contracts and Mesh. Whether you’re building from scratch or renovating a legacy monster (brownfield alert!), this chapter will sharpen your mental model and show how reuse, contracts, and architecture come together to form something… hopefully useful.

Building Your Mental Model

There is a lot of confusion about picturing what a data product is. I hope that Chapter 1 helped. However the versatility of a data product calls for a little more in-depth discussion, which I wanted to have with you.

Location of the Data

You: where is the data in a data product?

Jean-Georges (jgp): ...