Data Governance 101: Stop Firefighting, Start Engineering

🎤 Data Governance 101: Stop Firefighting, Start Engineering by Kateřina Ščavnická
🔗 https://ep2025.europython.eu/session/data-governance-101-stop-firefighting-start-engineering

📝 Abstract: Let’s face it, data debt is real, and it is killing your productivity!

Every hacky pipeline, missing contract, and “we’ll fix it later” adds to your data debt — and like tech debt, the interest is brutal. Broken dashboards, skyrocketing costs, and late-night firefighting are holding your team and data back from scaling and delivering value.

In this session, we’ll dive into real-world governance strategies like data contracts, semantic layers, and treating data as a product, showing how they can help cut costs, boost quality, and get ahead of your data problems.

What you’ll learn:

• How to stop data chaos at the source instead of endlessly cleaning up
• Why data contracts and semantic layers are your best friends
• How small governance tweaks can cut costs and improve data quality
• How to make data governance practical for engineers

Packed with hands-on strategies, this session will help you build smarter — not firefight.