#42 - Time for a little AgileData App feature show and tell

42 AgileData Features

I love building the AgileData Product with Nigel Vining. I love the fact that we are building something that makes the complex data work we do for our customers simpler and quicker.

We are literally building the product we have always wanted and needed to do data work, faster, easier and cheaper.

We are building a product that is focused on:

1. taking a data task that takes me an hour and making it 10 minutes.

2. taking a data task that I have to think about how I can do it, and getting the machine to recommend what I should do, reducing the need for cognition.

3. automating the data task so we don't have to do it, getting the machine to do the work for us.

Nigel and I have a specific set of complimentary skills which means we are pretty good at building the product we need.

The thing that neither of us are good at is Product Marketing. We have fallen into the old start-up trap of building it, rather than selling it.

Thats not such a bad thing, our current business model is to provide our customers with a Fractional Data Service. For $5k a month, they are buying a data team, that comes with a data platform and continuous data outcomes, not just our AgileData App & Platform.

Our product is designed to enable us to scale the Fractional Data Service. The goal is a single data person should be able to sustainably support at least 10 different organisation's at the same time.

As part of trying to achieve this scale we have built a pretty amazing product, when I show people they often comment at the breadth and depth of what we have built.

So I am going to try an experiment.

I am going to create 42 posts, one that outlines each of my favourite AgileData App feature we have built and why we built it.

At the end I will post a Google Sheet with the description of those 42 features (and a few more) as a recommended list of requirements for a data platform.

Each post will have the same structure:

• The What, short overview of the the feature;

• Feature Requirement, if you were asking a vendor for that feature what would you ask for;

• Requirement Rationale, if you had to justify to the powers to be why you needed this feature, you would use this;

• The How, a short interactive click through video of how it works in AgileData (seeing is believing);

• The Why, the story behind why we built that feature and what we learnt.

We have built these features because we needed them, so if you are looking to build or buy your own data platform, those are the features I would recommend you look for.

At the end of the 42 posts I will give you a shopping list of features, with the Feature Requirement and the Requirement Rationale which you can use as a requirements document or evaluation whenever you need it. I will also aim to add the features into that list that we know we need but haven’t built yet.

I will update this post as I go, to create a table of contents for the features so to speak, or you can click on the “42 Features” menu above to get a list of features/articles I have already posted.

#01 - Marketplace

#02 - Single Sign In

#03 - Catalog Browse and Search

#04 - Track 'N' Trace

#05 - Data Search

#06 - DataOps Notifications

Still to come:

1. Catalog Details

2. Data Map

3. Design Map

4. Disco

5. Answer Quick Question

6. Ask ADI

7. Trust Rules Roll Up

8. Custom Trust Rules

9. File Upload

10. API’s

11. Change Rule

12. Explore

13. Catalog Review

14. Menu Anywhere

15. Opinionated Data Architecture

16. Topic Canvas

17. Shared Tiles

18. Trust Rules Results

19. ADI assist

20. Events

21. Explore in Looker Studio

22. Share Google Sheets

23. Data Preview - Profile

24. Catalog - Business Context

25. Rule Data Diff

26. Rule version

27. Concept / Event Matrix

28. Renamed consume fields

29. Rule Step Wizard

30. Data sync

31. Natural Language

32. PII detection

33. Orchestration of dependent code

34. Data Contract

35. Export / Import rules

36. Data Match