I’ve spent years engineering data systems for enterprises,from high-growth companies to global giants. But one moment made me question everything: when three different reports on the same metric landed on my desk with three different answers. We had modern tools. We had smart people. What we didn’t have was trust in the data. That experience led me to overhaul our entire data stack, not to chase better tools, but to build something far harder: confidence. The Tools Weren’t Broken, Our Pipeline Was We had all the usual suspects,Snowflake, Databricks, dbt. But behind the scenes? Rogue scripts. Abandoned dashboards. Hidden dependencies. It was chaos in disguise. What I realized was this: the problem wasn’t what we used. It was what we couldn’t see. The stack worked, but the pipeline didn’t. It had become a tangled mess of shadow workflows that no one fully understood. This is a widespread issue. According to a 2023 survey by Monte Carlo, 74% of data professionals say their teams have experienced at least one major data incident in the last year due to lack of observability. survey survey I knew we had to reset. From Pipeline Builder to Accountability Architect My job title said “data engineer,” but my real job became designing accountability into the system. That meant building guardrails, not gates: Defining clear data contracts between teams Creating a monitoring layer for schema drift and job failures Designing interfaces that made data feel reliable, not just accessible Defining clear data contracts between teams Creating a monitoring layer for schema drift and job failures Designing interfaces that made data feel reliable, not just accessible We didn’t slow analysts down. We gave them systems they could count on. We adopted data quality tools that could flag anomalies in near real time and invested in schema registries to lock down how data was shared across business domains. Why Federated Governance Worked for Us Centralization failed us. Too slow, too opaque. But chaos wasn’t the answer either. What worked was federated governance. We let domain teams own their pipelines,but under shared standards: A unified metadata catalog Tag-based access controls Usage tracking to flag dead or misused datasets A unified metadata catalog Tag-based access controls Usage tracking to flag dead or misused datasets We modeled our approach after the principles laid out in Zhamak Dehghani’s Data Mesh, which emphasizes decentralizing data ownership while standardizing infrastructure and policies. This made collaboration easier and disagreements rarer. No more endless Slack threads over "which metric is right." Data Mesh Data Mesh Observability Changed the Game If you can’t see it, you can’t trust it. That’s the reality I lived through. So we made observability non-negotiable. We introduced: Real-time alerts on pipeline health End-to-end lineage so every metric could be traced Query-level analytics to spot inefficient patterns Real-time alerts on pipeline health End-to-end lineage so every metric could be traced Query-level analytics to spot inefficient patterns Tools like Monte Carlo and OpenLineage helped, but it was the cultural shift that mattered most. We didn’t just log events,we made them meaningful. We also built dashboards to track data freshness and anomaly rates, making reliability a KPI, not an afterthought. What I’d Tell Any Enterprise Data Leader You don’t need more tools. You need more visibility. You don’t need stricter control. You need better collaboration. If you’re swimming in dashboards but drowning in doubt, it’s time to step back. Ask the hard questions. Rebuild where needed. The ROI won’t come from faster queries, it’ll come from better decisions. Your goal isn’t perfect data. It’s reliable, explainable, trusted data. That’s what business leaders care about. And if you’re a data leader reading this, I’ll leave you with one last thought: the moment you start treating your pipelines as products, everything changes. Trust me. I’ve done it once. And I’d do it again.
