Data Products for Dummies: A Guide to the New Model for Managing Data

This article was originally published on dataops.live.

Alongside Sanjeev Mohan (former Gartner research VP) and Justin Mullen (DataOps.live CEO and co-founder), I co-authored Data Products for Dummies — a practical guide to understanding, building, and managing data products. We launched the book at Big Data London in September 2023.

The book addresses a fundamental shift in how organizations should think about their data assets. Rather than treating data as a byproduct of business processes, the data products model treats data as a first-class product with clear ownership, quality guarantees, discoverability, and lifecycle management.

We cover the FAIR principles — making data findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable — alongside a maturity model for organizations at different stages of their data product journey. The focus throughout is practical: not just the theory of why data products matter, but concrete steps for implementation.

A key conviction I bring to this work is that successful data products require two things above all: a great user experience and trustworthiness. Data consumers need to find what they need quickly and trust that what they find is accurate. Everything else follows from there.

The real-world results validate this approach. Pharmaceutical company Roche, using data product principles, achieved four times faster development velocity and $40 million in cost savings — demonstrating that treating data as a product isn't just philosophically appealing, it's financially compelling.

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