For decades, the language around data has barely changed. Every few years a new architecture or philosophy rises. We hear about data lakes, warehouses, meshes, fabrics, and observability platforms. Each is a promise to finally tame the chaos of data management. Billions have been invested across multiple generations of tooling
In 2014, my last startup was acquired. We joined a fast growing organization with a top-notch data team. They had invested heavily in data infrastructure. Data was strategic. They had "the hub," a Hadoop cluster built on HDFS. I thought: here's a company doing things right.
I wrote a post about thinking past medallion architectures. That one went a little deeper about the architectural characteristics that make thinking in “medallions” unnecessary. But the truth is, you don’t need to internalize all that. I’m guessing you sense that data just doesn’t work, even with
Let’s talk about something nobody wants to admit. Your marketing team has their own copy of customer data. Sales has a different version. Product is maintaining yet another extract. Finance built their own dashboard using data they pulled last month. Each team has created their own shadow copy of
Picture this: You’re in an executive meeting. The company just acquired another business, and the CEO wants to change how you calculate monthly active users to include the new customer base. Simple request, right? “That’ll be six months,” comes the response from the data team. Six months?! To
Why AI is exposing decades of accepted dysfunction You can’t move at AI velocity when your data team still says “that’ll take six months.” Here’s how an entire industry normalized broken patterns, and why AI is forcing us to finally confront them. I was talking to a
Culture doesn't just happen. You build it. You have to be intentional. Patrick Lencioni's "The Advantage" shaped how I think about culture. Values have to be real, not aspirational. They have to mean something. They can't be corporate nonsense that no one
A ritual playing out in boardrooms everywhere: the new data strategy presentation. This time it’s different. This time we’ll capture the value. The slides are beautiful. The architecture diagrams are comprehensive. Everyone nods. Nobody believes it. We’ve been here before. At least three times, in fact. The
Matterbeam goes against the data industry's complexity addiction. We built it to let small companies access sophisticated data integration without enterprise budgets. You're not locked into decisions. Time is on your side. Transform and emit data fearlessly as new use cases arise.
