The Collibra Product Team at Data Citizens ‘17
Collibra Catalog, Adoption Reporting, and Collaboration & Stewardship were our three main themes for this year’s Product Manager for a Day workshop at Data Citizens ‘17. Our focus on intense collaboration with attendees meant we returned from Data Citizens ‘17 with splendid, customer-validated product ideas, from Catalog-dedicated smart search functionality to measuring your adoption by tracking business rules references. The team also solicited customer feedback on the data governance personas, and ran an insightful (and fun!) prioritization exercise.
Product Manager for a Day
Last year we had two Product Manager for a Day sessions, covering Interactive Diagrams and Reporting. Some of the ideas covered in these sessions are already visible in the recent Data Governance Center 5.1 release.
Due to popular demand, six sessions took place this year. Because of the massive interest in Catalog, over 30 people participated in those highly-popular sessions. We stuck to our proven format: working with customers and partners to get from collaboratively-identified problems to prioritization and customer-validated solutions. For each of the session subjects, clear themes arose:
Collibra Catalog
For Catalog, the focus was on BI integration (with other tools used in the organization such as Tableau, SAP, and Workday); straightforward data discovery (in particular more intuitive search features with easy, configurable filtering); and the concept of a smart and ‘self-filling’ Catalog (tight integration with the other Collibra applications such as Glossary and Reference Data, as well as third party applications).
Adoption Reporting
There’s two sides to adoption reporting. First, your key performance indicators. How do you report on overall project progress and keep track of your data governance goals and milestones?
Second, your actual metrics. What do you want to measure that you can benchmark to get an idea of your project’s maturity?
We looked into measuring steward engagement and hardcore usage reporting (search tracking, measuring least/most viewed and referenced assets), as well as workflow and issue management analytics.
Collaboration & Stewardship
For collaboration & stewardship, communication was an important focus.
For example, attendees suggested that we provide ways to give attribute-specific feedback (a like, favorite, or contextual comment). Hidden collaboration areas (also known as ‘draft/publish’), where you can work with a core team before publishing, received plenty of backing as well.
The most important was deemed search. To involve and nurture the budding data citizen, a straightforward and intuitive search was deemed critical.
This led to some great ideas for improved scoring algorithms and context-aware, highlighted results.
It was satisfying to see that during the problem brainstorms, we not only managed to collaboratively identify problems, but we also collaboratively resolved them. Long-term customers spontaneously shared ‘pro tips’ and solutions with those who recently started their data governance journey. And for plenty of the problems mentioned, we could demo how we’re already addressing these issues in Data Governance Center 5.0 & 5.1.
The Persona Wall
The Collibra data governance persona team made its appearance throughout the conference. Joanna (data owner), Aarav (business analyst) and Hélène (data scientist) made cameo appearances on the main stage during the Catalog demonstration, whilst John (100% steward) got to help demo the Collibra mobile application ‘On-the-Go’.
The full team though, was introduced on what was quickly nicknamed ‘the persona wall,’ an interactive display where our customers and partners could tell us which personas are most important to their data governance organization, and offer further feedback. The top 5 most valuable personas:
- Robert ‘Bob’ Brown – Data Governance Manager
- Mike Jones – Chief Data Officer (CDO)
- Anita Morrison – Chief Steward
- Aarav Chopra – Business Analyst
- Luke O’Reilly – Technical Steward
John Fischer, 100% steward, dropped off the leaderboard. Dora Parker, our Data Protection Officer, did not make it to the top 5 either. Maybe next year – when companies have their GDPR use cases fully implemented?
We were glad to see the information these personas hold is just as useful to our customers as it is to us. Attendees were busy mapping the various personas on display to their data governance organization and asked if they could take them home. The answer to that: not yet, but we’re working on that! Join the User Participation Program (UPP) to stay updated.
Prioritization Exercise with the Collibrian Dollar
A technique commonly used for product prioritization, is ‘buy a feature.’ It’s a fun collaboration game of which we made our own version for Data Citizens ‘17. Every customer and partner visiting the Product team in Collibra Corner received a budget of 1000 Collibrian dollars to spend on product functionality of his or her choice.
The big winners of this exercise were ‘Integrations & Connectors’ and Search, closely followed by Workflows and Performance & Scalability.
This lead to in-depth discussion with customers on how they ‘invested’ their dollars, and a wide range of product feedback and suggestions.
Needless to say, these three exercises – PM for a day, the Persona Wall, and the Collibrian dollar investment – gave us plenty of great ideas to take back to the team. It was amazing to be able to tap into our customer’s knowledge and experience. We learned a lot on where our customers are in their data governance adoption curves, and how we can help them & their users take the next step towards data citizenship.
We did not just listen and solicit feedback on existing functionality at the conference. We shared sneak previews of upcoming releases (On-the-Go for Windows and iOS), prototypes (Reference Data), and of course the long-term product roadmap.
If you could not make it to Data Citizens ‘17, do not despair. You can join the Roadmap Webinars to go behind the scenes with the Collibra Product Management team. To learn everything there is to know about the freshly released Data Governance Center 5.1, sign up for the enablement sessions here.
Last but not least, keep an eye out for the ideation platform that we’ll release after summer. We want to make close collaboration with and between customers not a one-off event, but part of our creative process.
Data Citizens ’17 was great, thank you for making it so!
The Collibra Product Management & User Experience team
