Data Product Development: Building a Great Data Product

Many companies are shifting their thinking towards data products. Why? Because data products provide a consumption-ready set of high-quality, trustworthy, and accessible data that people across an organization can use to solve business challenges. But as organizations move in this direction, Chief Data Officers (CDOs) are looking for better, more efficient ways to manage data product development.

Building a Great Data Product in 5 Simple Steps

Building data products requires a shift in mindset for many organizations. It requires new skills, new processes, and new technologies. To be successful, it’s important to follow these four steps.

Develop your data product strategy

Step number one is to define your data product strategy. Without it, you have no clear direction, nor do you have a way to measure success. Developing a data product strategy requires you to gain clarity on your “why.” For example, are you looking to grow the business and increase revenue? Deliver better customer experiences? Minimize risk? It’s important to understand your opportunity so that the product you build meets your organization’s needs.

A data product strategy also requires buy-in from your business partners, aka your data consumers, as well as your leaders. It requires you to define budget and resource requirements so you can secure the funding and people you need to make the project a success.

Build your team and assess your technology

Once you have your strategy in place, it’s time to review your team. Data product development requires different skills. And many CDOs are finding gaps within their organization. As a result, they are hiring data product managers to lead data product development across their organization.

Data product managers, also called data product owners, are an emerging role, but one that we predict will continue to grow. They are responsible for designing, building, and managing the cross-functional development of a data platform, or a suite of specific data tools, to serve multiple internal and/or external customers.

“A data product owner is a newer concept, but it’s a recognition that data products are going to be the preferred way of consuming data for the vast majority of potential consumers.” Justin Borgman, Chairman & CEO, Starburst

It’s also important that you have the right technology in place. The best data product platforms provide turn-key solutions that combine machine learning with human feedback, a low-code/no-code environment, and integrated data enrichment, allowing you to easily integrate internal and external data in order to power analytical insights and drive operational processes. And for those of you considering a data mesh strategy, these capabilities will complement your efforts.

Develop a minimum viable (data) product

Just like in Agile product development, data product development requires you to deliver a MVP – or MVDP, as we like to say: minimum viable data product. This approach allows you to quickly and efficiently deliver something of value to your business partners. It gives your data consumers the opportunity to provide feedback, so you can iterate and make the data product even better than before.

Iterate, iterate, iterate!

A key principle of Agile development is iteration. And the same is true when it comes to developing data products. Deliver a MVDP to your data consumers. Collect their feedback. Make changes and add capabilities. Release again. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Tamr Mastering: A Templated Approach to Developing Data Products

Tamr delivers all the capabilities CDOs need to develop and deliver data products. Designed for consumption and ready for use, Tamr Mastering’s data product templates deliver high-quality, trustworthy, and accessible data that people across an organization can use to solve business challenges. Comprehensive, clean, curated, and continuously-updated, Tamr data product templates deliver data sets that humans and machines can consume broadly and securely across an enterprise.

Because Tamr uses a templated approach to data product development, you can accelerate time to value. Tamr Mastering data product templates provide the capabilities that enable you to quickly build a custom flow for your MDM program, author and curate data, and improve data quality for your operational processes, analytics, and data consumers.

Tamr Mastering data product templates include: