Data Mesh Radio #30 Don't Sleep on the User Experience in Data Mesh - Interview w/ Karen Passmore and Steve Stesney
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PredictiveUX website: https://www.predictiveux.com/
PredictiveUX partnered meetup: https://www.meetup.com/hexagon-ux-dc-chapter/
Karen LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karenpassmore/
Karen Email: karen at predictiveux.com
Steve LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephenstesney/
Steve Email: sstesney at predictiveux.com
In this episode, Scott interviewed Karen Passmore (CEO) and Steve Stesney (Data Product Lead) at consulting firm PredictiveUX. They touched on a lot of different topics - a key theme throughout is the importance of the user experience in data mesh, for both data product producers and consumers.
Karen highlighted some parallels between data mesh and content management projects and how to take some key learnings from the past and apply them to data mesh implementations. They discussed the importance of providing your internal people with the right content at their current point in their learning journey - a successful implementation of data mesh requires making it far easier and more scalable to share incremental work artifacts and knowledge - it also means your crucial company knowledge actually gets documented properly.
Steve talked about some historic challenges he had personally with decentralized teams - if you don't manage the cross domain collaboration, both at the business and the technical implementation levels, it is a major pain to stich your data together from all those sources. So there needs to be good alignment on interoperability. Basically, data mesh without a good interoperability strategy is just high quality data silos.
Karen and Steve both emphasized the importance of UX (user experience) for driving adoption. You can have the best solution in the world but if the users don't want it, it's not going to be successful. So working with them throughout the process is crucial to get to a successful implementation, whether that is data mesh or not.
Karen wrapped up by emphasizing the need to be patient and to not expect the same results or try to copy the exact path of other organizations implementing a data mesh. Every organization is very unique and you need to figure out what might work for your organization. Take learnings, not exact blueprints.
The last key point to extract is the need for multiple communication methods, especially for data requests. There may be some overlap but it's a great way to ensure reliability and scalability of your business processes.
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All music used this episode was found on PixaBay and was created by (including slight edits by Scott Hirleman): Lesfm, MondayHopes, SergeQuadrado, ItsWatR, Lexin_Music, and/or nevesf