Recently we co-authored the book Data Mesh For Dummies, along with our colleague Adrian Estala. We greatly enjoyed writing the book and collaborating to succinctly deliver the ideas around Data Mesh in a straightforward format. However, like many authors we were asked to trim our book’s word count to satisfy a strict page limit.

Fortunately, there’s a very popular medium known as blogs and we decided to salvage the text on Data Mesh roles and responsibilities and repurpose it here. Below, we are thrilled to present one of our lost chapters on Data Mesh roles and responsibilities.

Roles and Responsibilities in a Data Mesh

Embarking on a Data Mesh journey will result in organizational changes and adjustments to employees’ roles. Existing workers will be critical to the success of adopting a Data Mesh, as they have invaluable tacit knowledge to contribute to the Data Mesh journey. Therefore, the transition of data ownership from a central data team to decentralized domains should be approached as a reallocation of existing data-focused employees.

With that in mind, here are some of the roles and related responsibilities that will likely be involved:

• Executive Sponsor: Responsible for overall corporate data strategy and ensuring alignment with the business strategy. This is likely to be a member of the C-suite due to the significance of the organizational change required.
• Domain Owner: Represents the needs of the domain when defining federated computational governance standards.
• Data Product Manager: Responsible for the scope,delivery, and lifecycle of one or more data products within a domain.
• Domain Data Architect: Designs how data flows from source to products, defines data product data models, and ensures adherence to architecture standards within a domain.
• Data Product Developer (Data Engineer): Creates and maintains data products.
• Infrastructure Engineer: Responsible for the operation and maintenance of the self-serve data platform.
• Domain SME / Analyst: Experts in the business area that relates to the domain, and understands the consumers’ needs, to ensure that data products meet their business objectives. Typically the first consumer of a data product.
• Legal / InfoSec / Audit: A set of expert resources available to the domains to provide guidance on areas such as corporate risk and compliance standards.

It’s important to note that these are roles, and not necessarily individual people. In some organizations, especially in the early adoption phase of Data Mesh, some employees will take on multiple roles. In addition, the choice of technologies within a self-serve data platform can dramatically affect the workload and efficiency of the employees in these roles.