Data Product Owner Skills

You hired a data person, but you needed a product person.

Most companies load their Data Product Owner with:

• Data quality
• Compliance
• Definitions
• Pipelines
• Access management

Then wonder why nobody uses the data products they ship…

Here’s the problem: the Data Product Owner’s primary focus should be value, usability and adoption. Not quality. Not pipelines. Not compliance.

Those belong to the Data Steward, Data Owner and the Data Custodian. Not to them.

The “product person” Data Product Owner owns the roadmap.
They own the backlog.
They own the satisfaction of every data consumer.

Their question isn’t “Is this data correct?” It’s “Is this data actually solving a real problem?”

That’s not a data engineering mindset.
That’s a product mindset.

And you will rarely find it in a data engineer’s CV.

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