How Technical Should Data Stewards Be?
Answers About Managing Data as Products
In my prior post on data mesh, I mentioned that data stewards manage domain-specific data as products. Instead of leaving one data scientist to manage all data in an organization, a team of data stewards “ensure that their data is ready for use by your BI analytics tools of choice, thus preparing the clean data for use by your colleagues and customers.”
As I re-read that article, it occurred to me that this might confuse some readers. What does “preparing the clean data for use” mean? If your Chief Marketing Officer stewards your marketing data, do they need a data scientist’s technical skills?
Nope: The most effective data stewards often have non-technical roles. In the data mesh context, data stewards apply standards set by your data governance council to the data products they manage in their domains. These standards for data and metadata quality are consistent across all data products. Each steward applies those standards to their own data products and is free to use these standards how they see fit.
