Kill Your Data Team: Why Product Teams Should Own Data

Image by the author.

“We need to build a Data Center of Excellence.”

These words have launched a thousand failed data initiatives. Nothing makes me more skeptical than the term “Center of Excellence” — it’s corporate-speak for “expensive silo that will struggle to deliver actual value.”

If you’re reading this, you’ve probably experienced the typical data team dysfunction:

• endless request queues,
• insights that arrive too late to matter,
• and the constant refrain of “we’re working on infrastructure” while business questions go unanswered.

I’m arguing here for an embedded approach, one that dismisses any central arguments for “a central team is more efficient” and instead starts with a simple idea: central data teams mostly don’t deliver, so why not start on the other end?

If you only have 5 minutes: here are the key points

• Centralized data teams often become bottlenecks, delivering delayed and misaligned insights.
• Embedding data professionals directly into product teams boosts speed, context, and business impact.
• Real-world examples from companies like HubSpot, Booking.com, Snaptravel, and Stash show that decentralized or hybrid models deliver…