👋 Welcome to Data as a Product Driver
The divide between product and data functions is costing organizations money, speed, and competitive advantage every single day: data teams spending time searching for projects to collaborate on with product organizations; product people who don’t feel ownership of the data for their products; critical data missing for analysis because features get released without proper tagging; you name it.
Unfortunately, I’ve lived through all of this. I’ve led service-provider data teams that created bottlenecks everywhere while product teams remained data-illiterate. I’ve watched companies struggle with AI initiatives because their data foundations weren’t ready.
But I’ve also seen the other side. At the companies I’ve worked with, we recognized these issues and fixed them. After months, and sometimes years, of hard work, I had the chance to lead autonomous product teams with true ownership of their data. These teams used data to inform every stage of product development, from idea validation to retirement. I’ve also helped create strategic partnerships between data professionals and product teams so they could co-own business outcomes. Through this, I learned what it really takes to treat data as a product driver with clear value propositions and measurable impact.
To get there, I read extensively both product management books and data books. Product management books taught me about user research, product discovery, and becoming a better manager, but they treated data as something that happens elsewhere. Data books taught me about data modeling, warehouses, and how to implement ML and AI applications, but they didn’t do that from a product perspective.
I never found a book that bridges both worlds. So I wrote it. And in this newsletter, I aim to amplify my voice online.
