Encouraging data producers to adopt a product mindset is key to ensuring high-quality data. While data products are often meant for internal use, the principles of product thinking are applicable across various domains, such as developer tooling, which your organization might already be familiar with.

Before creating a data product, it’s essential to understand why your organization requires it, who will benefit from it, and what they need and expect from it. These insights stem from data consumers who hold a clear understanding of the business challenges they aim to address through the data product. Articulating these needs to the data producers is vital. Knowing these needs, data producers can appreciate the business value they create by providing this product, giving them a sense of ownership of that value.

These data products should be useful by themselves for driving data-driven applications and services, for example, dashboards and analytics...