What is Data Mesh?
A decentralized data architecture where domain teams own and manage their own data products.
Definition
Data mesh is an organizational and architectural approach that shifts data ownership from a central data team to the domain teams that produce it. Sales, marketing, product, and finance each own their data, publishing it as a product with defined interfaces, quality standards, and SLAs. It's a direct reaction to the bottleneck that forms when a single central data team can't keep up with requests from every corner of the business.
Why It Matters
Central data teams become bottlenecks. Every dashboard request, every schema change, every new report sits in a queue. Data mesh distributes that ownership so each team moves at its own pace. But it's not free. It requires strong governance, self-serve infrastructure, and a culture shift where domain teams accept responsibility for data quality.
Example
Instead of the data team building every Salesforce report and marketing dashboard, each team owns their domain's data products. Sales ops publishes pipeline data with defined schemas. Marketing publishes campaign attribution data. Both are queryable through a shared data catalog.