#250 Staying Aligned on the Vision in Data Mesh - Lessons from Volkswagen's Journey - Interview w/ Christoph Spohr

Please Rate and Review us on your podcast app of choice!Get involved with Data Mesh Understanding's free community roundtables and introductions: https://landing.datameshunderstanding.com/If you want to be a guest or give feedback (suggestions for topics, comments, etc.), please see hereEpisode list and links to all available episode transcripts here.Provided as a free resource by Data Mesh Understanding. Get in touch with Scott on LinkedIn if you want to chat data mesh.Transcript for this episode (link) provided by Starburst. See their Data Mesh Summit recordings here and their great data mesh resource center here. You can download their Data Mesh for Dummies e-book (info gated) here.Christoph's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christoph-spohr-2a33b619b/In this episode, Scott interviewed Christoph Spohr, Lead Architect of Big Data Platforms and the Product Owner of Data Mesh at Volkswagen Group. To be clear, Christoph was only representing his own views on the episode.Quick Note: apologies that Scott's audio is a bit weird, he had yet to build his makeshift sound studio in the Netherlands.Some key takeaways/thoughts from Christoph's point of view: "There are not solutions, only trade-offs." Understand that nothing is perfect.!Controversial!: Your biggest risk to a use case is choosing the wrong abstraction, the wrong architectural paradigm. When working with a domain, look for a way to achieve the required result that is as close to their existing way of working as possible. Scott note: this can become challenging on finding reusable ways of working if you go too far but greatly smooths domain-level adoption. It's all a tradeoff 😜The second biggest risk is do stakeholders really feel and acknowledge the pain the existing approach/system is causing and want to move? The third biggest risk is about promising things you cannot deliver - obviously look to avoid that.?Controversial?: A really key aspect of doing data mesh well is having and keeping perspective: doing data mesh is more about "aligning people on a shared vision and not getting lost in the overall process." Don't get so bogged down in exact implementation details if possible.Keep people informed and aligned and start your conversations on clarifying what...