#41 Winning Over Application Developers: Agency not Autonomy - Interview w/ Jessitron (AKA Jessica Kerr)

Sign up for Data Mesh Understanding's free roundtable and introduction programs here: https://landing.datameshunderstanding.com/Please Rate and Review us on your podcast app of choice!If you want to be a guest or give feedback (suggestions for topics, comments, etc.), please see hereEpisode list and links to all available episode transcripts here.Provided as a free resource by Data Mesh Understanding / Scott Hirleman. Get in touch with Scott on LinkedIn if you want to chat data mesh.Transcript for this episode (link) provided by Starburst. See their Data Mesh Summit recordings here (info gated)Jessitron pithy tweet: https://twitter.com/jessitron/status/1471352190149087233Jessitron Twitter: @jessitron / https://twitter.com/jessitronJessitron emails: jessitron @ gmail.com OR jessitron @ honeycomb.ioJessitron Presentation: Principles of Collaborative Automation: https://jessitron.com/2020/08/03/talk-principles-of-collaborative-automation/Jessitron blog post: To share the work, share the decisions: https://jessitron.com/2022/02/01/to-share-the-work-share/Book mentioned: Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies by César A. HidalgoIn this episode, Scott interviewed Jessica Kerr more widely known as Jessitron who is a Principal Developer Advocate at Honeycomb.io. Or as many affectionately refer to her, the Empress of Software. You're probably gonna enjoy this one :)Scott asked Jessitron on because she had a very pithy tweet about data mesh being "conscious design for unexpected use" and because she knows the developer mindset extremely well and many folks are having trouble working with the developers to get them bought in to sharing their data well.Jessitron started off by discussing one of the big issues with application development: despite the tooling and process advancements of the last 20 years, it's all somehow only made application development harder. So the starting advice is don't just add more to their plate. It probably won't go well!Her biggest point was giving application developers agency in how they share their data is key. Autonomy is just passing the responsibility over without the help. Application developers want guidance/direction to the target outcome, but they want to make the choices on how to achieve said target outcome while being given the resources to do so. The information and capability to do their job is key.For driving buy-in, start with the why, not the ask. Let them know why their data is valuable. And BE SPECIFIC! The