Straight Data Talk

Jovita Tam , data and AI advisor with a background in engineering, law, and finance, joined Yuliia and Dumke to challenge how organizations approach governance. Jovita argues that data governance is a way of thinking, not a tool you purchase, explaining why culture eats strategy and why most governance programs fail at the checkbox exercise.  Jovita shares her approach to helping executives u...

Adnan Hodzic, Lead Engineer and GenAI Delivery Lead at ING, joined Yuliia how ING successfully scaled generative AI from experimentation to enterprise production. With over 60 GenAI applications now running in production across the bank, Adnan explains ING's pragmatic approach: building internal AI platforms that balance innovation speed with regulatory compliance, treating European banking regula...

Ryan Dolley, VP of Product Strategy at GoodData and co-host of Super Data Brothers podcast, joined Yuliia and Dumke to discuss the DBT-Fivetran merger and what it signals about the modern data stack's consolidation phase. After 16 years in BI and analytics, Ryan explains why BI adoption has been stuck at 27% for a decade and why simply adding AI chatbots won't solve it. He argues that at large ent...

Thomas in't Veld , founder of Tasman Analytics, joined Yuliia and Dumke to discuss why data projects fail: teams obsess over tooling while ignoring proper data modeling and business alignment. Drawing from building analytics for 70-80 companies, Thomas explains why the best data model never changes unless the business changes, and how his team acts as "data therapists" forcing marketing and sales...

Elliot Foreman and Andrew DeLave from ProsperOps joined Yuliia and Dumky to discuss automated cloud cost optimization through commitment management. As Google go-to-market director and senior FinOps specialist, they explain how their platform manages over $4 billion in cloud spend by automating reserved instances, committed use discounts, and savings plans across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. The...

Kasriel Kay , leading data democratization at Velotix, joined Yuliia and Dumke to challenge conventional wisdom about data governance and catalogs. Kasriel argues that data catalogs provide visibility but fail to deliver business value, comparing them to "buying JIRA and expecting agile practices." He advocates for shifting from restrictive data governance to data enablement through policy-based a...

Patrick Thompson, co-founder of Clarify and former co-founder of Iteratively (acquired by Amplitude), joined Yuliia and Dumky to discuss the evolution from data quality to decision quality. Patrick shares his experience building data contracts solutions at Atlassian and later developing analytics tracking tools. Patrick challenges the assumption that AI will eliminate the need for structured data....

Kir Titievsky, Product Manager at Google Cloud with extensive experience in streaming and storage infrastructure, joined Yuliia and Dumky to talk about streaming. Drawing from his work with Apache Kafka, Cloud PubSub, Dataflow and Cloud Storage since 2015, Kir explains the fundamental differences between streaming and micro-batch processing. He challenges common misconceptions about streaming cost...

Serhii Sokolenko , founder at Tower Dev and former product manager at tech giants like Google Cloud, Snowflake, and Databricks, joined Yuliia to discuss his journey building a next-generation compute platform. Tower Dev aims to simplify data processing for data engineers who work with Python. Serhii explains how Tower addresses three key market trends: the integration of data engineering with AI t...

Andrii Yasinetsky , CTO and co-founder of Diadia Health and AI expert, joined Yuliia to share his perspective on the current AI landscape and its future implications. Currently Andrii and his team are building an AI-first healthcare platform focused on metabolic and hormonal health. Andrii talks about how AI is changing both technology stacks and business economics. We discuss what's wrong with AI...

Jess Kyle , a Data Engineering Leader with 13 years of experience across startups and enterprises, joined Yuliia to share her mission of making data work more enjoyable for everyone involved. As a leader of a data engineering team at a sports betting company, Jess shared how transparent communication can transform team dynamics and stakeholder relationships. In her work she challenges the common n...

Deepti Srivastava , Founder of Snow Leopard AI and former Spanner Product Lead at Google Cloud, joined Yuliia to chat what's wrong with current approaches to AI integration. Deepti introduces a paradigm shift away from ETL pipelines towards federated, real-time data access for AI applications. She explains how Snow Leopard's intelligent data retrieval platform enables enterprises to connect AI sys...

Bogdan Banu , Data Engineering Manager at Veed.io, joined Yuliia to share his journey of building a data platform from scratch at a fast-growing startup. As Veed's first data hire, Bogdan discusses how he established a modern data stack while maintaining strong governance principles and cost consciousness. Bogdan covered insights on implementing consent-based video data processing for AI initiativ...

Jason Touleyrou , Data Engineering Manager at Corewell Health joined Yuliia to discuss why most organizations struggle with data governance. He argues that data teams should focus on building trust through flexible systems rather than rigid controls. Challenging traditional data quality approaches, Jason suggests starting with basic freshness checks and evolving governance gradually. Drawing from...

Richard He , Founder at Fundamenta – Data Consultancy, former Engineering Director at Virgin Media O2  and creator of Practical GCP YouTube channel, joined Yuliia to discuss the critical concept of "cost of inaction" in data infrastructure modernization. Based on his two decades of experience, including several successful migrations, Richard emphasized the importance of proactive platform evo...

Paolo Platter , CTO and co-founder of Agile Lab and Witboost, joined Yuliia to share how his 10 years of building custom data solutions for clients led to creating Witboost - a platform that helps big companies manage their data products at scale. One of their customers used Witboost to build over 250 data products in just 18 months, showing how well the platform works at scale. Paolo explained wh...

Amy Raygada , data consultant and founder of Cosmodata, recently joined the Thoughtworks team. Together with Yuliia, she unpacks what it’s like to work as a data consultant in today’s world, where AI challenges every organization. Amy shared her journey from individual contributor to consultant, offering insights on navigating organizational silos, the similarities between being an individual cont...

Danilo Sato , AI Platform & Engineering Portfolio Leader at ThoughtWorks (16+ years), joined Yuliia and Scott to discuss enterprise AI readiness assessment and how implementation is progressing. Danilo shared a fascinating case study about how technical solutions often face non-technical barriers. He shared his views on data mesh principles intersecting with AI solutions and treating AI models...

Martin Fiser, Field CTO at Keboola with 8 years at Google, joined Yuliia and Scott to challenge modern data stack complexity and costs. He advocates for all-in-one platforms over fragmented solutions, highlighting how companies waste up to 40% of time on tool integration. Martin shared insights on US-European cultural differences in data approaches and warned against "development by resume" cultur...

Scott Hirleman , founder of Data Mesh Radio, has a very diverse career, including a role as FinOps Manager. In this podcast, we sit down together to discuss his FinOps philosophy: cost containment, cost attribution, and cost forecasting. It's an insightful conversation on how to balance costs for data teams with both data and business considerations in mind.

Daniil Shvets , CEO and co-founder of ASAO DS: Data & AI Consulting Boutique, previously led various companies' Data Science and Product teams. Daniil sat down with Yuliia and Scott to share his opinion on Data Science being a business department with appropriate data skills rather than an IT department. He explained why having 54 ML models in one of the largest retailers in the USA is the wro...

Eric and Jean-Georges Perrin are talking about their upcoming book Implementing Data Mesh , but also about actually executing Data Mesh through an open-source project. 

Sayle Matthews leads the North American GCP Data Practice at DoiT International. Over the past year and a half, he has focused almost exclusively on BigQuery, helping hundreds of GCP customers optimize their usage and solve some of their biggest 'Big Data' challenges. With extensive experience in Google BigQuery billing, we sat down to discuss the changes and, most importantly, the impact these ch...

Michael Toland is a Product Management Consultant and blog contributor with ⁠Test Double⁠ , residing in Columbus, OH. His experience spans 8 formal years of internal Product Management, with a few additional years of doing Product Management without even knowing what the field really was. In this episode, Michael shared how a data empowered company the size of Verizon was able to drastically reduc...

John Grubb is the Sr. Director of FinOps and Cost Modeling at Platform.sh. With experience as a former Data Platform Director, Director of BI & Analytics, and Director of Customer Care, John brings a sharp perspective on why cloud costs matter. He knows how to align financial and engineering teams and believes that FinOps is about maximizing the value of every cloud dollar rather than just cut...