Balancing Broad Data Access With Usability at Scale Austin Wilt 1 - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

April 18, 2019 Balancing Broad Data Access With Usability at Scale Austin Wilt 1

Data Product Management at Slack

3 Key Data PM Principles Increase curation as you broaden the audience Balance foundational investments with immediate value to the business Connect your engineers with their end users

Increase curation as you broaden the audience

Define Audiences Leadership / All Employees Limited Curated Narrowest access to the most ● Data curated data. Business Analysts / Primarily reporting functionality ● Subject Matter Experts ● Most user friendly toolset Curated Sandboxes ● Access to curated data sandboxes ● Reporting and Advanced Data Users exploration functionality Full Data Warehouse ● User friendly toolset with education Broadest access to all data ● ● Reporting, exploration, and curation functionalities ● Most advanced / high skill toolsets

Develop a Curation Strategy Define Curate Visualize ● Work with the ● Operationalize ● Build data model for business to define datasets visualization tool datasets ● Alerting, timeliness, ● Execute on ● Create detailed testing, monitoring, reporting and definitions etc exploration ● Translate to ● Consider data functionalities engineering model, standards, ● Education and requirements and repeatability adoption ● Education and adoption

Specialize, Divide, and Conquer! Product Business Data Data Define Science Science Engineering Engineering Curate Data Eng and Data Eng IT Data Eng IT Business IT Business Visualize Intelligence Intelligence

Results! ● Trustworthy, consistent data from higher quality data pipelines ● Self-serve data access!!! ● More time for data scientists to do analysis

Balance foundational investments with immediate value to the business

Previous Focus ● Ambitious quarterly planning to build for scale very far down the road ● Get very distracted by immediate business needs during the quarter New Focus ● Balanced planning - allocating time to both immediate business needs and long term initiatives ● Guard time and shield resources for strategic initiatives ● Dedicate resources to the business and reinforce wins that drive immediate business value

Balanced Planning Immediate Business Critical Strategic Projects Stakeholder Value Initiatives Long term investments ● ● Product datasets and Company OKRs ● updates Foundational datasets ● Company initiatives we ● ● Tool usability must support Infrastructure ● improvements overhauls ● Keep the lights on ● Logging support ● Tech debt ● Experiment support ● New tool explorations

“” Dedicated Resources Most of the team will have responsibilities across project types Reserved for Responsible to Strategic Projects Stakeholders Wall some team members off for dedicated work

Results! ● Reliable delivery against business critical initiatives ● Meaningful progress against select strategic work ● Better prioritized stakeholder projects with more thoughtful engineering solutions

Connect engineers with their end users

More contact, more context, more connection, better results. Define stakeholder responsibilities ❖ Product/Design/Eng Team Connect engineers←→ stakeholders ❖ Data-informed decisions! Embed engineers alongside analysts ❖ Data Modeling & Data Tools Architecture E.g. Explore (query tool) E.g. Foundational Data Sets Data Platform E.g. Clog extraction Data Infrastructure External support teams e.g. Ops, Internal Tools, Visibility E.g. Hive and Presto

“Data Pods” Embedded in Product Teams Product Analytics Data IT Business Engineering Intelligence

Results! ● High priority progress in data tools and experiments work ● Metrics in every product area with interactive self-serve visualization ● Repeatable and scalable data pipelines

Thank You! 18