Building Data Products

Chapter 4. Building Your First Data Product

A Note for Early Release Readers

With Early Release ebooks, you get books in their earliest form—the author’s raw and unedited content as they write—so you can take advantage of these technologies long before the official release of these titles.

This will be the 4th 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].

So, you want to build your first data product. Congratulations! You’re about to move from theory into practice, from hand-wavy “mesh talk” to something you can actually poke at with an API call. This chapter is your first lap around the track: I’ll define who you’re building for, what roles they play, and how to organize the work so your product doesn’t end up like a group project where only one person does the homework.

You’ll meet your main personas (Cindy, Juliette, Beth), map out responsibilities with a RACI (the adult version of “calling dibs”), and split the work into four pragmatic streams: platform, runtime, infrastructure, and consumer experience. You’ll also get a tour of the sidecar (the brain of your product), its internal database, and the first endpoints that make your data product feel alive.

By the end, you’ll understand not just how to sketch a data product, but how to get a minimal, running version into the world—whether you’re ...