Gathering requirements for the self-service portal

A data mesh portal should be treated like a product. It’s the entry into the mesh. The first part of building any product is gathering requirements. This is the most critical part of product development.

You need a lot of brainstorming around the requirement-gathering activity. Depending on the size of your company and the complexity of your data platform, this might mean a few day-long meetings with all the stakeholders or weeks of meetings and interviews with stakeholders, data scientists, engineers, and business analysts.

Here are a few pieces of criteria that will drive the development of the portal:

• The size of your company
• The complexity of the data estate
• The nature of the data and analytics projects
• The size of the data mesh operations team
• The available full-stack resources to build the portal

Now, let us look at some of the most common requirements that are a bit obvious and also...