Data Mesh Newsletter #04

Zhamak's book is a-coming! Meetups are here! Get pumped!

Big news #1: Zhamak announced her upcoming data mesh book! Please give her some love (Twitter; LinkedIn); O’Reilly early release is coming soon (a few weeks), full release in Q4 - yes, we’ll keep you updated and have a reading club. The cover animal is a snipe and it’s adorable 😄

Big news #2: We are starting meetups! Both our first two meetups have extended Q&A sessions with data mesh implementers so get your questions ready 😎

Tristan Baker and Suresh Raman from Intuit will share the story of their data mesh journey so far and strategy going forward (signup: Th May 13 at 6pm PDT / 9pm EDT).
Wannes Rosiers from DPG Media will share how data mesh has increased their news personalization/recommendations, including how they heavily leverage ML (signup: Th May 20 at 9pm CET / 3pm EDT / noon PDT).

For future meetups, we are figuring out regular time slots so everyone worldwide can attend at least some meetups and there is consistency - but it might be a bit wibbly-wobbly for a few months. We plan to do meetups frequently so if you want to present/be on a panel, reach out to Scott in the Slack or via email.

We have an events Google calendar now if that is easier for you - link

Recent Content:

Summary: Guiding the evolution of data mesh with fitness functions
by Dave Colls (ThoughtWorks); article

A follow-up to a webinar with Zhamak and Dave of the same title answering questions that came up from attendees (webinar linked in article). Briefly covers combining data across domains, measurement and observability re data mesh, org size re when data mesh costs outweigh the benefits, etc. The most interesting piece was on centralization/decentralization balance re your self-serve platform and infrastructure:

Domain-driven Data Architecture
by Caleb Jones (Disney); video (33min; no transcript available)

An overview of how Disney built their data platform for data mesh 😄 Includes a lot of thoughts around anti-patterns and how to centralize the platform responsibilities so you can distribute your data ownership to the domains but domains don’t all have to reinvent and reimplement the wheel so-to-speak.

Data strategies to drive business value at scale
by ThoughtWorks - Zhamak, Emily Gorcenski, and Prasanna Pendse contributed; article

Very good summation of the general analytics landscape that led to where we are and why Zhamak conceived data mesh. If you need to provide a gentle introduction to data mesh to an executive audience, look no further.
This feels like the perfect summation of why data mesh is so interesting to so many; breadth of use cases -> trying to push everything into the same format doesn’t work and trying to store everything in the same place in different formats owned by people who don’t fully grow the data is a nightmare:

Scaling Data: Data Informed to Data Driven to Data Led
by Crystal Widjaja (Reforge); article

Overall, an interesting piece if not super well aligned with data mesh priorities/organization - for data mesh, the questions would be different but the same internal alignment and reflection is necessary. Specific to data mesh, the following stood out VERY clearly re recent conversations/questions about team incentivization:

Call for Content / Speakers:

Again, we launched our meetups this week. If you are implementing a data mesh, people want to hear from YOU. You might think that you need to be “done” with your data mesh journey to talk about it - not true! Even talking about your initial approach or how you drove/are driving buy-in internally is highly desired.
We are also considering using Twitter Spaces - audio-only, easy for panels - for less regimented chats soon.
Poke Scott in the Slack or respond to this post if you might even consider being interested in presenting or being on a panel re data mesh!

Upcoming Learning Opportunities:

Data Mesh Learning Meetups:

Tristan Baker and Suresh Raman from Intuit will share the story of their data mesh journey so far and strategy going forward (Th May 13 at 6pm PDT / 9pm EDT)

Wannes Rosiers from DPG Media will share how data mesh has increased their news personalization/recommendations, including how they heavily leverage ML (Th May 20 at 9pm CET / 3pm EDT / noon PDT)

Roundtables:

Datanova for Data Analysts (by Starburst, a vendor)
May 18th starting at 10am EDT / 3pm BST
Panel with Zhamak Dehghani, Cindi Howson (ThoughtSpot), Daniel Abadi (University of Maryland), and Gareth Stevenson (Bank of America)

Navigating Your Data Swamp; by ThoughtWorks and The Digital Banker
May 17th/18th (May 17th 7:30pm PDT / May 18th 10:30am SGT / 12:30pm AEST)
Panel with Zhamak Dehghani, Sham Arora (Standard Chartered Bank), Gunjan Bhatt (HSBC), Nalini Haridas (ThoughtWorks), and Jonathan Ng (Revolut)

/Newsletter

If you have questions/comments/concerns/suggestions for future newsletters, please let us know at community@datameshlearning.com.

Special thanks to DataStax for allowing me to focus on this community and hopefully helping you all learn more about data mesh 😅