Unlocking self-service analytics at scale with Data Products

Snowplow Data Products bridge the gap between data producers and data consumers, documenting the behavioral data used in your business to empower a culture of self-service.

The cost of a lack of data product management 

Behavioral or event data has many applications in an organization. From analytics dashboards for internal users to recommendation engines for end customers. As with any data set, the complexity of the data value chain increases as more people in your organization use behavioral data to gain insights and create data products. 

With a lack of defined ownership and poor documentation of data sets, organizations often suffer from poor collaboration between those that are producing data and those that are consuming it, limiting the amount of value that can be realized from data. 

Data producers can inadvertently make changes that impact downstream use cases because they do not know how the data is being used, while consumers are limited in delivering value with the data due to a lack of or siloed knowledge about what data is available and how to use it. 

Moreover, data teams may not be the right people to create and manage all data sets. Other teams may be more equipped to create and manage data sets that meet the requirements of downstream data consumers. This can restrict organizations from collaborating effectively and scaling the use of their data to ensure a self-serve culture as the data team becomes the bottleneck of lodged requests. 

Snowplow Data Products bridge the gap, bringing ownership and a central source of truth for the behavioral data you collect 

Snowplow Data Products bridge the gap between data producers and consumers. It enables your to create well-documented data sets that allow everyone in the organization to easily see what behavioral data is collected, when it is collected, how it is triggered, how to access it, and how ownership is defined within your organization.

This documentation serves as a data contract, i.e. a formal agreement between the producers of the data product and the consumers. Data products are designed to tell you who owns the data, what metadata is associated with it, and how you can access the data in your warehouse or lake with sample queries. Let's break this down the features or try our interactive demo.

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Define ownership of data and create a central source of truth 

Provide all users with clear information about the data product and its purpose within your organization. Clearly identify the team and primary owners responsible for the data product to clarify responsibilities and improve collaboration between teams.

Improve visibility between different users: teams can subscribe to email updates for each data product to be informed about changes.

Create clarity and visibility into your event tracking

Improve clarity in your company with the "event specification". This gives all users a clear understanding of the events and entities being tracked as well as the validation in place.

You can also detail how tracking should be implemented, including instructions on where and how events should be triggered, as well as screenshots. 

Combined with Snowplow’s underlying schema technology, teams using Snowplow not only have access to rich, high-quality behavioral data, but can also collaborate more effectively and scale the use of the data to more applications in the organization. 

Implement custom tracking faster with Snowtype

Alongside Data Products we also introduced Snowtype in January. Snowtype is a command line interface (CLI) tool that can generate functions, typings and documentation within your application folder for your project’s data structures and event specifications based on a set of configuration options. 

When coupled with Data Products you can create and implement custom tracking at scale. 

How to get started with Data Products

Want to learn more about Snowplow and Data Products? Reach out to one of Snowplow’s experts for a demo.