CDO Matters Ep. 18 | When Data Is Your Product with Saleem Khan
CDO Matters Podcast
The Role of Product Managers in Salt Snowflake
Do you have product managers working in your team? Are they called analysts or are they more customer success type people? What are the roles there? Yeah. So we do have product managers on the team. They are more, I would say, the traditional agile product development sort of folks. But that spark of that idea could come from anywhere. It could come from a data subject matter expert, right?
As an expert in your field, you need to approach your work from every perspective.
If a medical doctor can deliver a particular diagnosis for a patient, then they should also be able to do the same for themself. The same principle applies to data organizations and how they approach their own enterprise data.
As a CDO, if your internal customers must pay to access the data or insights you provide, would they feel confident in your ability to deliver value from your data products? Is your business singularly focused on understanding and meeting customer needs — both now and on the road ahead?
If not, then what’s standing in your way? For many CDOs, the answer lies in making that crucial transition from being data-driven to data product-driven.
In this episode, we discuss making the shift to becoming data product-driven. Malcolm is joined by Saleem Khan, Discovery Data’s Chief Data & Analytics Officer (CDAO). During the discussion, Saleem shares valuable insights on thriving within the CDO’s function for an organization whose core product is data.
Saleem’s shared insights include a framework for managing a data product pipeline, leading a team of data product managers, and implementing processes to anticipate future market demand. Saleem’s recommendations even include insights on a sales enablement methodology that can be used to ensure data consumers will derive benefit from data products and the critical role that a marketing function can play in ensuring data customers have a clear understanding of how a data product helps deliver a specific business outcome.
Given Saleem’s role is primarily as a Chief Product Officer (CPO), it should be no surprise that he won’t discuss data quality, data governance, data pipelines or anything else deeply focused on data management. Instead, he focuses on several best practices and actionable insights for how to approach the role of a CDO should you wish to ensure stakeholder value remains at the core of everything you do.
Key Moments
[1:57] Saleem’s Career Journey to Discovery Data
[3:45] How Data Can Be Monetized/Validated
[6:30] RAD Defined
[9:12] The Role of a CDAO
[13:10] Implementing the FRAME Framework
[19:30] Aggregating Customer Data
[21:40] Data Governance as a Business Model
[23:35] Anticipating Consumer Interests
[25:20] Taking a Product Management Approach
[27:25] The Problem with ‘Data Literacy’
[31:24] The Current State of Blockchain
[34:00] Data as a Consumerized Product
[38:51] The Fragmentation of Data Sharing
Key Takeaways
Predicting Debt and Data Monetization (3:45)
“One of the first forays I truly had into data science and the data world was building out a prediction model…where we would try to determine which companies were most likely to issue debt. So, on one end of the spectrum, you’ve got Microsoft and Apple which are incredibly cash-rich and they usually don’t borrow…then on the other end of the spectrum, you’ve got companies that require a lot of cash because they’re very capitol-driven and capitol-intensive and have to take out a lot of debt. And whenever debt is taken out, SMP has to take a rating on it.” — Saleem Khan
The Role of a CDAO (9:14)
“As Chief Data and Analytics Officer, 50% of my job is sales and marketing, the other 50% is product development…My job becomes making sure I communicate with customers, especially our largest customers, as often as I can…Data is our product, so [for customers] who better to hear from than the Chief Data Officer about what trends there are, and where you are taking your data set?” — Saleem Khan
Adopting the FRAME Framework (14:12)
“We have a framework as part of our data operations. We have another framework called, FRAME. FRAME is an acronym that stands for ‘Fuel, Refine, Analyze, Magnify and Execute’. Each of these components is a different part of the data operations lifecycle…There are multiple ways to distribute your data and your content to customers.” — Saleem Khan
The Problem with Data Literacy (27:25)
“I happen to be vehemently opposed to that phrase [data literacy] because it turns the problem to a user problem where I think it should be on the creation side. If you’re creating a data product, if you’re creating something for consumption…and they don’t know how to use it and don’t know how to derive value from it, I would argue that that is a product failure, not a user failure.” — Malcolm Hawker
Creating a Product Narrative (29:25)
“When you have a product that has a miss, there is one of two reasons: One could be that it was just a terrible product, and two could be ‘wrong place, wrong time’…but the products that do work out, they tend to work out because the CDO is working directly in tandem with sales and marketing to create that narrative, to tell that story of value to the customer… to make sure that customer has a simple and crystal clear understanding of how this data product will deliver a specific business outcome.” — Saleem Khan
About Saleem Khan
Saleem is the Chief Data & Analytics Officer (CDAO) at Discovery Data. With over 15 years of experience in the data space as a patented product, data and technology executive, he remains proficient at using data-driven and analytical techniques to deliver new digital products and implement digitally-enhanced process transformations.
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