Name a business owner for every data product. Not the team that built it. A named executive who answers for what the product costs and what it returns. Without that, the data team owns everything and the business owns nothing.
Why "the data team owns the data" fails
When ownership sits only with the data team, every request is free to the person making it. Anyone can ask for a dashboard, a new cut or a fix, and nobody who asks sees what it costs or what it pushes out. The backlog grows, the team stays busy, and the portfolio gets heavier every quarter. This is how a data team ends up at capacity while the business still says it cannot get what it needs.
Ownership is not a data governance committee. It is a simple pairing: for each product, one person on the business side who benefits from it and is willing to be asked whether it is worth keeping.
Three moves that create ownership
1. List the products and give each one an owner. Start with the twenty most used or most expensive. Write the name of one business executive next to each. Where nobody volunteers, that is a finding: a product nobody will own is a candidate to stop.
2. Make every request show what it displaces. The simplest rule I know: a new product or major change cannot enter the portfolio unless the request names something to simplify or remove. Call it the kill-forcing function. It turns "we need this" into a trade-off the owner has to make, and it protects the team's capacity without anyone having to say no.
3. Review each product on a fixed rhythm. Once a quarter, the owner sees one page: what the product costs to run, how many of the intended people use it, how often it breaks and what decision it supports. Keep, rebuild or retire. The rhythm matters more than the format, because a review that happens only when something goes wrong is not ownership.
What the owner is accountable for
- The full running cost of the product, including incidents, support and the business hours spent working around it
- Whether the intended audience actually uses it
- The decision it exists to support, stated in one sentence
- The call to keep, rebuild or retire it
The data team stays accountable for building and running it well. The split is what changes behaviour: builders answer for quality, owners answer for value.
Expect resistance, and plan the first decision
The first time an owner is asked to retire something, there will be pushback. Plan for it. Choose one clear candidate, bring the numbers, and have the CEO or CFO back the decision. If the first one holds, the rest become easier. If it is reversed, the rule is dead before it started.
Start with one page
This week, write the list of your ten most expensive data products with a name next to each. Where the name is a data team member, ask who in the business would feel it if the product disappeared. That person is your candidate owner.
If you want the review rhythm set up with your own products, see Data Investment Governance, or start with a workshop to find the first items to stop.