Pushing on open doors

Hey, hope you’ve had a good week :)

Today I’m writing about pushing on open doors when getting started with data contracts. Also links to articles on the ownership of data quality, the basics of data architecture, and OTel with lakehouses.

Also, on Monday I’ll be live on LinkedIn/Substack/YouTube talking about Driving Data Quality with Data Contracts: What Data & AI PMs should know with Nick Zervoudis. Do join us!

Attendees will also get a 25% discount code for my new data contracts course.

Pushing on open doors

I’m often asked where to start with a data contracts implementation, and my answer is always the same.

It’s not the most critical dataset. It’s not the largest. It’s not the one with the most personal data.

The best place to start is where you have a team of data producers who are ready and willing to work with you on this.

Maybe they are a team of data producers who also have data engineers/scientists forward deployed, and are therefore more aware of the problems data contracts could help resolve.

Maybe you have a good working relationship with the team lead of a producer of data - someone who would be happy to give feedback and help contribute to the implementation.

Wherever it is, there’s an open door you can push against that reduces the effort to get started.

This allows you to iterate on the implementation together with the end users, getting their feedback early, and with a commitment to use the solution once it’s ready.

As an added benefit, these engaged users gain a great sense of ownership of the implementation, and become promotors of data contracts to their peers, making the case for them when you’re not in the room.

Once you’ve done this a few times you can then start to target the places where data contracts can have the largest impact, i.e. the most critical data, and doing so from a position where the solution has been validated and is already in use.

That’s why whenever I start a new initiative, including a new data contracts implementation, I’m looking for open doors as the best place to get started.

Interesting links

Who Owns Data Quality, Anyway? by Hodman Murad

Who owns data quality? Everyone who touches the data, within the boundaries of what they can actually control.

💯

The ABSOLUTE Basics of Data Architecture by Juha Korpela

It’s quite simple really :)

Cheap OpenTelemetry lakehouses with parquet, duckdb and Iceberg by Clay Smith

As Clay says, you probably don’t want to replace your observability stack with a lakehouse stack, but it’s interesting to see how a crossover of tooling can be used.

Being punny 😅

Argentina is colder than you’d think… It’s bordering on Chile.

Thanks! If you’d like to support my work…

Thanks for reading this weeks newsletter — always appreciated!

If you’d like to support my work consider buying my book, Driving Data Quality with Data Contracts, or if you have it already please leave a review on Amazon.

🆕 Also check out my self-paced course on Implementing Data Contracts.

Enjoy your weekend.

Andrew