Building Data Products

Chapter 6. Integrating Data Products into Your Organization

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This will be the 6th chapter of the final book. Please note that the GitHub repo will be made active later on.

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This chapter starts where the glossy diagrams usually stop.

Up to this point, data products may have sounded almost reasonable: define them, design them, govern them, publish them, and voilà: Organizational harmony, reusable data, and happy AI systems. Real life, as always, is a little less cinematic.

The moment a team tries to integrate data products into an actual organization, the questions start multiplying. Who owns them? Who funds them? Who maintains them when the first enthusiastic workshop is over? How many do you need? Where do they live? Who gets to say no? And perhaps the most dangerous question of all: are you solving a business problem, or just creating a prettier layer of data confusion?

This is why integration is not only about technology. Technology matters, of course. Platforms, catalogs, pipelines, policies, and standards all have a role to play. But the harder part usually sits elsewhere: in operating models, incentives, ...