Episode description

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Transcript for this episode (link) provided by Starburst. You can download their Data Products for Dummies e-book (info-gated) here and their Data Mesh for Dummies e-book (info gated) here.

Arne's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arnelaponin/

Chris' LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ctford/

Foundations of Data Mesh O'Reilly Course: https://www.oreilly.com/videos/foundations-of-data/0636920971191/

Data Mesh Accelerate workshop article: https://martinfowler.com/articles/data-mesh-accelerate-workshop.html

In this episode, Scott interviewed Arne Lapõnin, Data Engineer and Chris Ford, Technology Director, both at Thoughtworks.

From here forward in this write-up, I am combining Chris and Arne's points of view rather than trying to specifically call out who said which part.

Some key takeaways/thoughts from Arne and Chris' point of view:

1. Before you start a data mesh journey, you need an idea of what you want to achieve, a bet you are making on what will drive value. It doesn't have to be all-encompassing but doing data mesh can't be the point, it's an approach for delivering on the point 😅
2. Relatedly, there should be a business aspiration for doing data mesh rather than simply a change to the way of doing data aspiration. What does doing data better mean for your organization? What does a "data mesh nirvana" look like for the organization? Work backwards from that to figure where to head with your journey.
3. A common early data mesh anti-pattern is trying to skip both ownership and data as a product. There are existing data assets that leverage spaghetti code and some just rename them to data products and pretend that's moved the needle.
4. "A data product is a data set + love." The real difference between a data product and a data set is that true ownership and care.
5. ?Controversial?: Another common mesh anti-pattern is trying to get too specific with definitions or...