This week, I'm chatting with Karen Meppen, a founding member of the Data Product Leadership Community and a Data Product Architect and Client Services Director at Hakkoda. Today, we're tackling the difficult topic of developing data products in situations where a product-oriented culture and data infrastructures may still be emerging or “at odds” with a human-centered approach. Karen brings extensive experience and a strong belief in how to effectively negotiate the early stages of data maturity. Together we look at the major hurdles that businesses encounter when trying to properly exploit data products, as well as the necessity of leadership support and strategy alignment in these initiatives. Karen's insights offer a roadmap for those seeking to adopt a product and UX-driven methodology when significant tech or cultural hurdles may exist.

Highlights/ Skip to:

• I Introduce Karen Meppen and the challenges of dealing with data products in places where the data and tech aren't quite there yet (00:00)

• "It’s not really fair to get really excited about what we hear about or see on LinkedIn, at conferences, etc. We get excited about the shiny things, and then want to go straight to it when [our] organization [may not be ] ready to do that, for a lot of reasons." - Karen Meppen (03:00)

• "If you do not have support from leadership and this is not something [they are]  passionate about, you probably aren’t a great candidate for pursuing data products as a way of working." - Karen Meppen (08:30)
  

• "You can’t automate something that you haven’t defined. For example, if you don’t have clarity on your tagging approach for your PII, or just the nature of all the metadata that you’re capturing for your data assets and what it means or how it’s handled—to make it good, then how could you possibly automate any of this that hasn’t been defined?" - Karen Meppen (38:35)

• "Nothing upsets an end-user more than lifting-and-shifting an existing report with the same problems it had in a new solution that now they’ve never used before." - Karen Meppen (40:13)
  

• Data Product Leadership Community https://designingforanalytics.com/community/