Top 12 benefits of data products for users and the business

Data products have many benefits. They create a new, curated way of interacting with datasets and place team collaboration and business questions at the forefront of data analysis. Businesses adopt data products for many reasons, including ease of use, improved data reliability and trustworthiness, and new opportunities for cross-functional sharing. 

Also, data product adoption includes many benefits for both data producers and data consumers. Let’s explore some of the use cases for data products and the business cases that drive their adoption. 

#1 Data products are designed to meet demand 

Users create data products to meet specific demands and use cases. They are focused and designed to meet demand. They help focus attention on the core needs of datasets and the business problems surrounding them, achieving greater insight and clarity.

#2 Data products enable data democratization across the organization

Anyone with access rights can produce a data product for themselves or others.

Power to the business functions

Business owners understand the problems they want to answer. Data products empower business functions to solve problems quickly and with agility. They put the power of an ETL pipeline alongside the power of business context. The result is faster insights and better use of data. 

Save, share, collaborate

Data products allow every business unit to create, save, and share business insights, placing data more directly in the hands of those who use it. Data products help short-circuit misunderstandings between departments and create greater cross-functional collaboration, reducing the need for long conversations and multiple iterations and speeding the time to insight.

#3 Data products are easily reused and adapted to fit new scenarios 

This ensures that different teams can benefit from work already started elsewhere in the organization. In general, their packaged nature helps maintain both focus and reuse.

#4 Data products are discoverable and accessible 

Data products are searchable and organized to help teams quickly find and access the information they need to succeed. Discoverability and accessibility ensure that data is always available to answer the right questions.

#5 Data products support data federation at their core

At the same time,  the same datasets can be viewed differently by different teams within the business. Because of this, it is no longer necessary to make multiple copies of a dataset. Instead, data products allow customized access to the same data, each tailored to the needs of individual business functions.

#6 Data products facilitate committed data ownership

Data products provide a superior user experience when compared to traditional query methods. Data products are focused, curated, and ready to use, and this precision helps derive insights.

Organizational benefits of data products

Data products also solve specific business problems and enhance the organizational processes of the businesses that use them.

#7 Teamwork: Both data consumers and data consumers benefit from data products

Data consumers benefit from greater accessibility, increased reliability, and the ability to bring the data closer to the business context. Data moves closer to the underlying business contexts, directly engaging the teams that own that context. 

Data producers benefit from a reduced workload, owing to the improved self-sufficiency of data consumers. Technical teams can address exceptions and overall trends rather than being drawn into day-to-day needs across the entire business.

# 8 Data products enhance efficiency in several different ways

They reduce the time spent liaising between teams, improve autonomy and self-sufficiency, and ensure that the underlying datasets are correct. 

Data producers particularly benefit from data products by tracking their use over time.

#9 Data products are iterable

The teams that own data products improve them over time. Because they are easy to access, share, and maintain, the time between iterations is much shorter than traditional methods, speeding progress.

#10 Data products can also enhance security

Data products include specific roles, responsibilities, and permissions from the outset. This feature is critical for any business, especially highly-regulated industries, and sensitive datasets, including those involving high-risk personal or financial data.

#11 Data products are highly scalable and increase agility

Data products connect data and people and are social and organizational by nature. Curated and ready-for-consumption, data products open up the data world and reduce bottlenecks across the business. A data product developed in one setting is easy to use in another. They are shared within teams and across teams. Individual data products can also be connected for complex solutions, providing another layer of use.

#12 Data products help facilitate an agile workflow and reduce costs

Their focused, curated nature makes them well-suited to iterative workflows that move business problems forward step by step. They can also be updated and modified easily. If the problem changes or the data shifts, this ensures that the data product shifts along with it. In agile workplaces, this represents a powerful tool to help facilitate dynamic growth. Data products save money by making data more accessible to non-technical users, reducing costs by decreasing reliance on expensive central IT teams. They reduce complexity, while the. self-service approach saves time. 

Data products are an innovative, modern way of creating curated datasets that can be saved, published, searched for, shared, and consumed across teams to provide business value. Designed to solve targeted business questions, data products offer benefits not only to data producers and data consumers, but to the organization as a whole. Take a look at how data products benefit your organization with this infographic.

Data products generate value for organizations by letting domain experts codify their business knowledge and expertise with as little additional help from within or without the domain as possible. A data lake and analytics platform enabled by Starburst Galaxy on AWS is an ideal environment for the creation and consumption of data products, as it is built around decentralized data production in the hands of the domains and the data-producing teams. Starburst data products blend the power of Starburst’s analytical query engine with the discoverability and user-friendly capabilities of a data catalog. All this with built-in access control and security integrations with governance tools to provide a secure, high-performance solution. Curious yet? Learn everything you need to know about data products with our free self-driven course at Starburst Academy, Explore Data Products.