099 - Don’t Boil the Ocean: How to Generate Business Value Early With Your Data Products with Jon Cooke, CTO of Dataception

Today I’m sitting down with Jon Cooke, founder and CTO of Dataception, to learn his definition of a data product and his views on generating business value with your data products. In our conversation, Jon explains his philosophy on data products and where design and UX fit in. We also review his conceptual model for data products (which he calls the data product pyramid), and discuss how together, these concepts allow teams to ship working solutions faster that actually produce value.    Highlights/ Skip to: Jon’s definition of a data product (1:19)  Brian explains how UX research and design planning can and should influence data architecture —so that last mile solutions are useful and usable (9:47) The four characteristics of a data product in Jon’s model (16:16) The idea of products having a lifecycle with direct business/customer interaction/feedback (17:15) Understanding Jon’s data product pyramid (19:30) The challenges when customers/users don’t know what they want from data product teams - and who should be doing the work to surface requirements (24:44) Mitigating risk and the importance of having management buy-in when adopting a product-driven approach (33:23) Does the data product pyramid account for UX? (35:02) What needs to change in an org model that produces data products that aren’t delivering good last mile UXs (39:20)   Quotes from Today’s Episode “A data product is something that specifically solves a business problem, a piece of analytics, data use case, a pipeline, datasets, dashboard, that type that solves a business use case, and has a customer, and as a product lifecycle to it.” - Jon (2:15)   “I’m a fan of any definition that includes some type of deployment and use by some human being. That’s the end of the cycle, because the idea of a product is a good that has been made, theoretically, for sale.” - Brian (5:50)   “We don’t build a lot of stuff around cloud anymore. We just don’t build it from scratch. It’s like, you know, we don’t generate our own electricity, we don’t mill our own flour. You know, the cloud—there’s a bunch of composable services, which I basically pull together to build my application, whatever it is. We need to apply that thinking all the way through the stack, fundamentally.” - Jon (13:06)   “It’s not a data science problem, it’s not a business problem, it’s not a technology problem, it’s not a data engineering problem, it’s an everyone problem. And I advocate small, multidisciplinary teams, which have a business value person in it, have an SME, have a data scientist, have a data architect, have a data engineer, as a small pod that goes in and answer those questions.” - Jon (26:28)   “The idea is that you’re actually building the data products, which are the back-end, but you’re actually then also doing UX alongside that, you know? You’re doing it in tandem.” - Jon (37:36)   “Feasibility is one of the legs of the stools. There has to be market need, and your market just may be the sales team, but there needs to be some promise of value there that this person is really responsible for at the end of the day, is this data product going to create value or not?” - Brian (42:35)   “The thing about data products is sometimes you don’t know how feasible it is until you actually look at the data…You’ve got to do what we call data archaeology. You got to go and find the data, you got to brush it off, and you’re looking at and go, ‘Is it complete?’” - Jon (44:02)   Links Referenced: Dataception Data Product Pyramid Email: joncooke@dataception.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jon-cooke-096bb0/

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Are you an enterprise data or product leader seeking to increase the user adoption and business value of your ML/AI and analytical data products? While it is easier than ever to create ML and analytics from a technology perspective, do you find that getting users to use, buyers to buy, and stakeholders to make informed decisions with data remains challenging? If you lead an enterprise data team, have you heard that a ”data product” approach can help—but you’re not sure what that means, or whether software product management and UX design principles can really change consumption of ML and analytics? My name is Brian T. O’Neill, and on Experiencing Data—one of the top 2% of podcasts in the world—I offer you a consulting product designer’s perspective on why simply creating ML models and analytics dashboards aren’t sufficient to routinely produce outcomes for your users, customers, and stakeholders. My goal is to help you design more useful, usable, and delightful data products by better understanding your users, customers, and business sponsor’s needs. After all, you can’t produce business value with data if the humans in the loop can’t or won’t use your solutions. Every 2 weeks, I release solo episodes and interviews with chief data officers, data product management leaders, and top UX design and research professionals working at the intersection of ML/AI, analytics, design and product—and now, I’m inviting you to join the #ExperiencingData listenership. Transcripts, 1-page summaries and quotes available at: https://designingforanalytics.com/ed ABOUT THE HOST Brian T. O’Neill is the Founder and Principal of Designing for Analytics, an independent consultancy helping technology leaders turn their data into valuable data products. He is also the founder of The Data Product Leadership Community. For over 25 years, he has worked with companies including DellEMC, Tripadvisor, Fidelity, NetApp, Roche, Abbvie, and several SAAS startups. He has spoken internationally, giving talks at O’Reilly Strata, Enterprise Data World, the International Institute for Analytics Symposium, Predictive Analytics World, and Boston College. Brian also hosts the highly-rated podcast Experiencing Data, advises students in MIT’s Sandbox Innovation Fund and has been published by O’Reilly Media. He is also a professional percussionist who has backed up artists like The Who and Donna Summer, and he’s graced the stages of Carnegie Hall and The Kennedy Center. Subscribe to Brian’s Insights mailing list at https://designingforanalytics.com/list.