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Prior to now decade, firms have spent billions on information infrastructure. Petabyte-scale warehouses. Actual-time pipelines. Machine studying (ML) platforms.
And but — ask your operations lead why churn elevated final week, and also you’ll seemingly get three conflicting dashboards. Ask finance to reconcile efficiency throughout attribution methods, and also you’ll hear, “It depends upon who you ask.”
In a world drowning in dashboards, one fact retains surfacing: Information isn’t the issue — product pondering is.
The quiet collapse of “data-as-a-service”
For years, information groups operated like inner consultancies — reactive, ticket-based, hero-driven. This “data-as-a-service” (DaaS) mannequin was effective when information requests had been small and stakes had been low. However as firms grew to become “data-driven,” this mannequin fractured below the load of its personal success.
Take Airbnb. Earlier than the launch of its metrics platform, product, finance and ops groups pulled their very own variations of metrics like:
- Nights booked
- Energetic person
- Out there itemizing
Even easy KPIs assorted by filters, sources and who was asking. In management evaluations, completely different groups offered completely different numbers — leading to arguments over whose metric was “appropriate” reasonably than what motion to take.
These aren’t expertise failures. They’re product failures.
The implications
- Information mistrust: Analysts are second-guessed. Dashboards are deserted.
- Human routers: Information scientists spend extra time explaining discrepancies than producing insights.
- Redundant pipelines: Engineers rebuild comparable datasets throughout groups.
- Choice drag: Leaders delay or ignore motion because of inconsistent inputs.
As a result of information belief is a product downside, not a technical one
Most information leaders suppose they’ve an information high quality problem. However look nearer, and also you’ll discover a information belief problem:
- Your experimentation platform says a characteristic hurts retention — however product leaders don’t consider it.
- Ops sees a dashboard that contradicts their lived expertise.
- Two groups use the identical metric identify, however completely different logic.
The pipelines are working. The SQL is sound. However nobody trusts the outputs.
This can be a product failure, not an engineering one. As a result of the methods weren’t designed for usability, interpretability or decision-making.
Enter: The info product supervisor
A brand new position has emerged throughout high firms — the information product supervisor (DPM). In contrast to generalist PMs, DPMs function throughout brittle, invisible, cross-functional terrain. Their job isn’t to ship dashboards. It’s to make sure the appropriate folks have the appropriate perception on the proper time to decide.
However DPMs don’t cease at piping information into dashboards or curating tables. The perfect ones go additional: They ask, “Is that this really serving to somebody do their job higher?” They outline success not by way of outputs, however outcomes. Not “Was this shipped?” however “Did this materially enhance somebody’s workflow or resolution high quality?”
In follow, this implies:
- Don’t simply outline customers; observe them. Ask how they consider the product works. Sit beside them. Your job isn’t to ship a dataset — it’s to make your buyer simpler. Which means deeply understanding how the product suits into the real-world context of their work.
- Personal canonical metrics and deal with them like APIs — versioned, documented, ruled — and guarantee they’re tied to consequential choices like $10 million finances unlocks or go/no-go product launches.
- Construct inner interfaces — like characteristic shops and clear room APIs — not as infrastructure, however as actual merchandise with contracts, SLAs, customers and suggestions loops.
- Say no to tasks that really feel refined however don’t matter. An information pipeline that no staff makes use of is technical debt, not progress.
- Design for sturdiness. Many information merchandise fail not from dangerous modeling, however from brittle methods: undocumented logic, flaky pipelines, shadow possession. Construct with the belief that your future self — or your substitute — will thanks.
- Clear up horizontally. In contrast to domain-specific PMs, DPMs should always zoom out. One staff’s lifetime worth (LTV) logic is one other staff’s finances enter. A seemingly minor metric replace can have second-order penalties throughout advertising and marketing, finance and operations. Stewarding that complexity is the job.
At firms, DPMs are quietly redefining how inner information methods are constructed, ruled and adopted. They aren’t there to wash information. They’re there to make organizations consider in it once more.
Why it took so lengthy
For years, we mistook exercise for progress. Information engineers constructed pipelines. Scientists constructed fashions. Analysts constructed dashboards. However nobody requested: “Will this perception really change a enterprise resolution?” Or worse: We requested, however nobody owned the reply.
As a result of govt choices at the moment are data-mediated
In right this moment’s enterprise, practically each main resolution — finances shifts, new launches, org restructures — passes by an information layer first. However these layers are sometimes unowned:
- The metric model used final quarter has modified — however nobody is aware of when or why.
- Experimentation logic differs throughout groups.
- Attribution fashions contradict one another, every with believable logic.
DPMs don’t personal the choice — they personal the interface that makes the choice legible.
DPMs be certain that metrics are interpretable, assumptions are clear and instruments are aligned to actual workflows. With out them, resolution paralysis turns into the norm.
Why this position will speed up within the AI period
AI received’t change DPMs. It should make them important:
- 80% of AI mission effort nonetheless goes to information readiness (Forrester).
- As giant language fashions (LLMs) scale, the price of rubbish inputs compounds. AI doesn’t repair dangerous information — it amplifies it.
- Regulatory stress (the EU AI Act, the California Shopper Privateness Act) is pushing orgs to deal with inner information methods with product rigor.
DPMs usually are not site visitors coordinators. They’re the architects of belief, interpretability, and accountable AI foundations.
So what now?
If you happen to’re a CPO, CTO or head of knowledge, ask:
- Who owns the information methods that energy our largest choices?
- Are our inner APIs and metrics versioned, discoverable and ruled?
- Do we all know which information merchandise are adopted — and that are quietly undermining belief?
If you happen to can’t reply clearly, you don’t want extra dashboards.
You want an information product supervisor.
Seojoon Oh is an information product supervisor at Uber.
