Panel: Shift Left Across the Data Lifecycle—Data Contracts, Transformations, Observability, and Catalogs | Prukalpa Sankar, Tristan Handy, Barr Moses, Chad Sanderson | Shift Left Data Conference 2025

Join industry-leading CEOs Chad (Data Contracts), Tristan (Data Transformations), Barr (Data Observability), and Prukalpa (Data Catalogs) who are pioneering new approaches to operationalizing data by “Shifting Left.” This engaging panel will explore how embedding rigorous data management practices early in the data lifecycle reduces issues downstream, enhances data reliability, and empowers software engineers with clear visibility into data expectations. Attendees will gain insights into how data contracts define accountability, how effective transformations ensure data usability at scale, how proactive how proactive data and AI observability drives continuous confidence in data quality, and how catalogs enable data discoverability, accelerating innovation and trust across organizations.

Data DevOps applies rigorous software development practices—such as version control, automated testing, and governance—to data workflows, empowering software engineers to proactively manage data changes and address data-related issues directly within application code. By adopting a "shift left" approach with Data DevOps, SWE teams become more aware of data requirements, dependencies, and expectations early in the software development lifecycle, significantly reducing risks, improving data quality, and enhancing collaboration.

This session will provide practical strategies for integrating Data DevOps into application development, enabling teams to build more robust data products and accelerate adoption of production AI systems.

ABOUT THE TALK: Data Contracts are a mechanism for driving accountability and data ownership between producers and consumers. Contracts are used to ensure production-grade data pipelines are treated as part of the product and have clear SLAs and ownership.

Learn about the why, when and how of Data Contracts and the spectrum from culture change to implementation details.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Chad Sanderson is the former Head of Data at Convoy. He has implemented Data Contracts at scale on everything from Machine Learning models to Embedded Metrics. He currently operates the Data Quality Camp Slack group.

ABOUT DATA COUNCIL: Data Council (https://www.datacouncil.ai/) is a community and conference series that provides data professionals with the learning and networking opportunities they need to grow their careers.

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WARNING: This episode contains detailed discussion of data contracts. The modern data stack introduces challenges in terms of collaboration between data producers and consumers. How might we solve them to ultimately build trust in data quality? Chad Sanderson leads the data platform team at Convoy, a late-stage series-E freight technology startup. He manages everything from instrumentation and data ingestion to ETL, in addition to the metrics layer, experimentation software and ML.  Prukalpa Sankar is a co-founder of Atlan, where she develops products that enable improved collaboration between diverse users like businesses, analysts, and engineers, creating higher efficiency and agility in data projects.  For full show notes and to read 6+ years of back issues of the podcast's companion newsletter, head to https://roundup.getdbt.com.  The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.