Data Mesh Accelerate Workshop

Step by Step

1. Ask the main sponsors of the organization to open the workshop with a speech about the importance of this engagement.
2. Make a brief presentation about the intention of the overall workshop, its agenda, and each activity. This is also your chance to bring attention to the ground rules (see below).
3. Ask everyone to quickly introduce themselves (tip: besides name and role, it is nice to ask people to share something else, such as favorite food or vacation spot).

The kick-off should end with a clear understanding of the goal for the workshop and the upcoming activities. It may be the first time some people get to work with each other, therefore the importance of the tip, making some space for people to connect to each other.

Setting clear ground rules, such as switching off phones or expecting people to be open to other perspectives will help participants understand what is expected of them and help the whole workshop run smoothly.

Step by Step

1. Share a quick introduction to the four principles
2. Ask the participants to share the threats to applicability for each principle: “What are the challenges in the way for us getting there?”
3. Have a conversation about the challenges ahead

It is important to get everyone on a similar level of understanding about Data Mesh and its principles. Someone with a good understanding of data mesh should give a short presentation to the audience, covering at a minimum:

• The “Why” of Data Mesh, what problems it aims to solve.
• The Four Principles of Data Mesh, explaining the reasoning and details of each.

After sharing the information, give the audience time to clarify, share and ask questions about the principles.

Ask the participants to share their previous experiences, concerns and where they see the challenges ahead for each of the four principles. Talking about the challenges helps the group get an initial feeling about the areas to pay closer attention to, especially in the beginning of a transformation driven by data.

“If we were to start applying this principle tomorrow, what challenges would we face?”

As participants are sharing their perspectives, ask the rest of the group to compare their perspectives to those being presented by asking three questions; what was the same, what was different and what surprised them. Asking these questions is a great way to compare and contrast the different perspectives in the group, uncovering similarities and blind spots.

By exploring the challenges faced by the organisation and the pain points raised by the participants, you are able to understand the current context and frame subsequent discussions appropriately. Given that Data Mesh aims to address common failure modes experienced by data organisations, understanding the specific challenges faced by your organisation is a great place to start!

Step by Step

1. Break the participants into smaller groups.
2. Have each group create a nirvana statement, then present it back to the larger group.
3. Combine to create a shared nirvana statement.

Breaking up the participants into smaller groups helps facilitate lively discussion. People increase their participation when working in smaller groups. We find that groups of 4-6 participants made active discussion easier.

Give each group the same instructions: to write a short statement about the ideal future state for the Data Mesh transformation. Stickies with the prompt “Our Nirvana is…” can help kick off this discussion.

After the groups have created their nirvana statements, reconvene and have a volunteer from each group read out their statement and share the thinking behind it.

The final task is to combine the different statements into a single shared nirvana statement. We recommend a fishbowl approach to stimulate discussion and collaboration. By the end of this process, you should have a single nirvana statement that everyone in the group agrees represents a desirable goal.

It is very interesting to see how this simple question gets participants very engaged and then aligned: what is our nirvana? Once the group is in agreement about that, it’s much easier to clarify the steps towards it.

Before talking about options, actions, initiatives, or any execution task towards achieving something big, it is essential to align on that high level goal.

Step by Step

1. Share details of the 4 Key Metrics and have a discussion about their importance.
2. Ask the participants to share where they consider they are today on each of these 4 metrics
3. Discuss future expectations around the 4 Key Metrics.

Start by introducing the 4 Key Metrics so that participants are familiar with their usage and the research behind them.

Within the workshop participants there should be representatives of different areas and different roles. This diverse group of people is needed to build a complete understanding of where they are for each of the metrics.

Start at the first metric, lead time, for example. Ask the participants to share where they consider they are today as per the Lead time metric:

• More than six months
• One to six months
• One week to one month
• One day to one week
• Less than one day
• Less than one hour

As the dots are gathered, ask the participants to share the stories behind the dots. The outliers in particular can offer valuable insights into the experience of the teams.

To close the activity, you should foster a conversation about how the participants think they could improve on these metrics over the next year. Even though the group is not yet deciding exactly how to get there, it is important to open the conversation and pay attention to the effort ahead of them. To kick off this conversation, you could say: “consider a year from now, where do you believe we could be at for each of these four metrics?”

Metrics bring an important conversation about desirable outcomes and how to measure progress. But even more, it raises everyone's attention to the current state and to a desirable future state, including an initial conversation about how far away the desirable state is. This activity brings tech and business together, not only by having a common goal, but also by looking at progress via similar (measurable) lenses.

Step by Step

• Identify the high level objectives of the organization
• Brainstorm key results that can measure progress towards those objectives
• Iterate over the OKRs as a group

OKRs can be tricky to write well. Are the objectives really worthwhile outcomes or are they outputs? Do the Key Results really capture what is needed to deliver on the Objectives? Avoid common mistakes by giving the participants time to refine their OKRs.

Identifying Objectives and Key Results helps make the journey ahead more tangible. As we move ahead and start to define the (data) products we intend to build, keeping these OKRs in mind helps bridge the gap between outcome and output.

Step by Step

• Divide the participants into groups and ask them to brainstorm use cases, using the template above.
• Have each group present their use cases to the wider group, followed by discussion and clustering
• Refine and select Use Cases

You should kick off this activity with a definition and discussion of Data Mesh Use Cases. This will make the brainstorming more productive. At this stage, you want to gather as many ideas as you can, because you will filter down later.

When the groups return, have a volunteer for each group present the use cases they identified and open up to a wider discussion. This is a great opportunity to combine (or cluster) similar use cases and discard non-analytical use cases.

Once you have a set of analytical use cases, you need to decide which ones to take forward to the next activities. If you have a few Use Cases, you might take all of them to the next activity. Although if there are too many, you should prioritize them. There are quite a few prioritization techniques, choose the one that fits your context.

“Build it and they will come” is a pitfall that many transformation efforts fall into, so by keeping the Use Cases connected to the Objectives previously identified, via the presented template, ensures that the work is aligned with the high level engagement outcomes.

Step by Step

1. Identify Data Products for the selected Use Cases
2. Identify sources and consumers for each data product
3. Map the connections between the data products

“If you were to hire a data product to help address this Use Case, what would its job be?”.

Jobs to be done (JTBD) is a framework created by Clayton Christensen for understanding customers and their motivations for adopting a new product or service. For defining a Data Product, we suggest you follow the same approach. The simple question above helps the participants start a discussion about how to put their data to good use.

Once you have identified the data product’s job, you can dig a little deeper by asking what data would be needed to actually carry out that job. This may include existing master data or operational systems, manual data entry or even other data products.

With the sources of the data product identified, you should ask who would actually be interested in consuming this data. This may include particular people, roles, other data systems or other data products.

Part of the vision behind Data Mesh is a mesh of reusable, interoperable data products. In the final part of this activity, you want to map out how the data products interact with each other. Wherever a data product consumes from another data product, draw that link on the board. At the end of this activity, you should start to see a data product interaction map

Identifying Data Products, their sources, their consumers as well as the connections between them are an essential part of a successful Data Mesh transformation. At this stage of the workshop, the group will have connected very important pieces of the puzzle for the first few Use Cases.

Step by Step

• The goals, use cases and data products identified during the workshop
• Any interesting observations, learnings or recommendations
• Details of next steps

It may also be helpful to invite external stakeholders, who may have an interest in the outcomes of the workshop to this session.

After the review, there are a few activities that we recommend wrapping up with: