To earn the title of "Product," a dataset must meet rigorous baseline standards. These six attributes ensure data is treated as a first-class asset that generates frictionless value.
Every true Data Product must possess these six foundational characteristics to minimize consumer friction and maximize trust.
Data consumers shouldn't have to rely on tribal knowledge. A data product must be easily searchable in a centralized or federated data catalog.
Also known as Addressable. Once found, the data product must provide a unique, programmatic address to reliably access the information.
Consumers must trust the data without running their own validation checks. This requires guaranteed SLAs and transparent lineage.
A product shouldn't require an engineer to explain it. Schemas, semantics, and syntax must be embedded directly with the data.
Data from one domain must easily join with data from another. This is achieved through enterprise-wide standardization.
Security cannot be an afterthought. Access control, masking, and encryption must be handled locally but governed globally.
Without these rigorous attributes, a "Data Product" is just another table dumped in a data lake. The goal of these six pillars is to completely eliminate consumer friction.
When a Data Scientist or Analyst finds a dataset that is self-describing, guaranteed to be accurate via SLAs, and accessible via standard SQL, they can generate insights in hours instead of weeks.
"Data as a Product shifts the focus from simply moving data around, to ensuring the data is fundamentally usable and valuable the moment it lands."
Use our evaluation framework to score your existing datasets against the six core DaaP attributes and identify gaps in your architecture.