Data as Product

The Growing Importance of Data Products

As Software has eaten the world, every software company is becoming a SaaS Company, and every SaaS company has a massive volume of data. As organizations transition to data-driven decision-making, they require the adopted SaaS products to provide in-product analysis abilities or data API to support their thriving needs for data.

What Is a Data Product?

You might have the same question in mind as me: What exactly is a data product? As defined by DJ Patil, the U.S. Chief Data Scientist, a data product is "a product that facilitates an end goal through the use of data."

A data product can sometimes be the synonym of data application; for the general consumer, as we all experience in our daily life, it can be either a digital banking statement or a Covid-19 cases tracker.

Four Types of Data Product

Public Data API: data product will be the Public API that the company exposed to internal or external data engineers/ developers who can consume or develop to another layer of a data product.
Viz/Dashboard: data engineers and analysts prepare the data pipeline and data model for business users to perform self-service analysis. And power analysts will design the canned dashboard for business owners.
Low-Code/No-Code Applications: citizen developers use low-code/no-code applications to build their internal business applications.
Web / Mobile Front-End UI: data products that are part of the external applications/ SaaS services that the company provides to their end customers.