Building Your Data Platform
While data mesh is more like 75/25 organizational/technical, that 25% is still crucial – and hard! We’ve had many conversations on the podcast about building out your data platform – both for data mesh or just building a platform in general – that should help you to advance your learning and test out if you are heading down a good path 🙂
We’ve split this page up so there is one toggle at the bottom where you can see a number of additional episodes that are tangentially related to building a data platform but aren’t a main focus of the episode.
A great place to start is by hearing from four experts at the same time about where to begin with building your platform and where challenges continue to arise through your journey. See the top takeaways in the show notes.
To listen to the episode and/or see the full show notes, please go here. For the episode transcript, please see here.
A very useful interview with both the lead developer and the product manager for a data platform being built from scratch. Lots of great insight into building a platform that will delight users.
To listen to the episode and/or see the full show notes, please go here. For the episode transcript, please see here.
A great interview with someone building out her third data platform on behalf of her clients. Some really good and useful insights into what to keep an eye on and where to focus throughout your journey.
To listen to the episode and/or see the full show notes, please go here. For the episode transcript, please see here.
Adelle and team are building out their platform slowly and incrementally in a very interesting way. This episode can give you permission to figure it out along the way. Plus, Adelle is just fun!
To listen to the episode and/or see the full show notes, please go here. For the episode transcript, please see here.
Very useful insights into Yotpo’s build out of their data mesh platform, especially as they made build versus buy decisions over the years. You will have to build far more of your platform than you’d like at the moment so it’s really important to be ready with a good decisioning framework that considers long-term needs.
To listen to the episode and/or see the full show notes, please go here. For the episode transcript, please see here.
Jen gives some great advice on creating a framework for deciding which vendors to choose for your own platform. There will be lots of decisions and this gives you another great perspective on making bets on vendors that might not be what you’ll need right now but can grow into it.
To listen to the episode and/or see the full show notes, please go here. For the episode transcript, please see here.
Jyotshna takes you through the learnings of, as the title suggests, building your data platform from scratch. There are lots of things that are widely applicable to many journeys and many that are pretty rare, so interesting listening.
To listen to the episode and/or see the full show notes, please go here. For the episode transcript, please see here.
While not specific to data mesh, this will help you to understand how to build your data platform for scale and evolution. Both are absolutely crucial to your long-term data platform success.
To listen to the episode and/or see the full show notes, please go here. For the episode transcript, please see here.
Another great episode on building your platform in the long term. There are some really great insights on creating a decision journal to keep perspective on past decisions and building for the future.
To listen to the episode and/or see the full show notes, please go here. For the episode transcript, please see here.
As mentioned above, these are episodes that aren’t focused on data platform but really have some useful insights into the topic at hand.
#119 Cautionary Learnings From a Startup Doing Data Mesh: Orfium’s Journey to Decentralized Data Success w/ Argyris Argyrou and Konstantinos Siaterlis
A great listen on where things can go wrong with trying to build out the perfect platform upfront and how you can recover from decisions.
#163 Improving the User Experience for All Parties – Early UX Learnings from Data Mesh at DNB w/ Alice Parker
Alice did her masters thesis on user experience design around data mesh so there is a lot of very useful info on the different user personas you’ll deal with in data mesh.
#40 Getting Data-as-a-Product Right and Other Learnings From Adevinta’s Data Mesh Journey w/ Xavier Gumara Rigol
Not specifically related to data platform but there is a lot of really interesting insights into how far the platform extends as well as ownership specifically at Adevinta.
#38 Pursuing “Platform Thinking” Through Data Mesh w/ Eric Broda
Good insights into extending your thinking of building your platform throughout all aspects of your journey.
#166 Capital One’s Data Mesh Journey and How They Created a New Product Along This Journey w/ Salim Syed
Salim shares some insights from building out the platform for Capital One that led them to build their own product around cost management for Snowflake in data mesh.
#208 Making Prioritization a Priority and Focusing on Delivering Value w/ Srinivas Paluri
Srinivas led the data engineering team at Zillow from before and through their data mesh journey including building out their platform.
#139 Reflecting on Learnings from Glovo’s Early Data Mesh Journey w/ Javier Granda and Pablo Giner Abad
The Glovo team shared about what they wished they focused on sooner with their platform which can help you do the same.
Part 3 about keeping your existing architecture is pretty relevant (and the answer is not really but you can keep lots of your tech) – it starts at min 29.
#21 Data Mesh in Practice: Insights from Zalando’s 2 Year Journey w/ Data Mesh w/ Max Schultze
Max was one of the leaders of the data engineering team at Zalando. He shares a lot of great information about how the platform and people play together.
#78 Minimum Viable Data Mesh? w/ Paul Andrew
What is the minimum slice of a platform you can build at what point in your journey and still be successful?
#101 H&M’s Data Mesh Journey So Far Including Finding Reusability in Interesting Places w/ Erik Herou
Erik was a leader on H&M’s platform team and he shares about going at your own pace, you don’t need to rush your journey 🙂
#126 Evolving from Data Projects to Data As a Product – A Data Platform Six Years in the Making w/ Blanca Mayayo and Pablo Alvarez Doval
While not specific to data mesh as a platform, really insightful on treating your platform as a product and where you can go wrong.
For any interview or panel episode, there are show notes – that start to get quite extensive after episode 100 – as well as transcripts for any interview or panel episode past #46 and most past #32. You can see a list of all episodes and available transcripts here.
