Paolo Platter, CTO and co-founder of Agile Lab and Witboost, joined Yuliia to share how his 10 years of building custom data solutions for clients led to creating Witboost - a platform that helps big companies manage their data products at scale. One of their customers used Witboost to build over 250 data products in just 18 months, showing how well the platform works at scale. Paolo explained why setting rules for data teams becomes harder as companies grow, and shared how he shifted from saying "yes" to every client request as a consultant to building a product that works for many companies.Paolo Platter - https://www.linkedin.com/in/paoloplatter/

This talk will explore a platform strategy that emphasizes the decentralization of data and analytics, aiming to achieve an optimal balance between autonomy and governance, thereby increasing iteration and innovation speed while ensuring compliance with regulations. Attendees will learn how to support the entire data product lifecycle, enabling teams to operate independently while adhering to governance and architectural standards. 

The discussion will highlight the following key areas:

1. Autonomy and Innovation: How decentralized data platforms empower teams to innovate faster by reducing dependencies and bottlenecks. Examples of successful implementations will be provided, illustrating how autonomy can lead to increased iteration and innovation speed.

2. Governance and Compliance: Strategies for maintaining robust governance frameworks that ensure data quality, security, and compliance with regulations such as GDPR and HIPAA. The talk will cover tools and best practices for monitoring and enforcing compliance in a decentralized environment.

3. Data Product lifecycle: A comprehensive approach to supporting the data product lifecycle, from data product prototyping to the data product operations, monitoring and change management. 

4. Adoption: Real-world scenarios where organizations have navigated the trade-offs between autonomy and governance, creating the right condition for platform adoption.

Summary Data mesh is a frequent topic of conversation in the data community, with many debates about how and when to employ this architectural pattern. The team at AgileLab have first-hand experience helping large enterprise organizations evaluate and implement their own data mesh strategies. In this episode Paolo Platter shares the lessons they have learned in that process, the Data Mesh Boost platform that they have built to reduce some of the boilerplate required to make it successful, and some of the considerations to make when deciding if a data mesh is the right choice for you.

Announcements

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Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you share your experiences working with data mesh implementations? What were the stated goals of project engagements that led to data mesh implementations? What are some examples of projects where you explored data mesh as an option and decided that it was a poor fit? What are some of the technical and process investments that are necessary to support a mesh str