Takeaways from the Acryl Data Offsite

The entire Acryl Team met up in Joshua Tree, California November 6–10 2022, marking the first time our remote-first team met in person.

We flew in from San Francisco, New York City, Chicago, Austin, Wisconsin, India, Portugal, and Hungary. While we love our Zoom-based team meetings, brainstorming sessions, happy hours, etc., it was a ✨total joy✨ to have everyone in the same room.

The Acryl Team in Joshua Tree National Park

We had four main goals for our time together:

Celebrate our wins
Finalize our near-term goals
Amp it up as a team
Connect with one another

The DataHub Community is central to everything we do, so we’re sharing this high-level readout of how we spent our time together to provide transparency into where we are putting our focus and energy in the upcoming months.

Aditya Radhakrishnan and Chris Collins hackin’ away in Joshua Tree

Here’s a rundown of what we discussed!

Celebrating our Wins

2022 has been full of growing excitement and DataHub adoption within the Data Practitioner community, as well as rapid innovation within the open-source DataHub project. We’ve reached some remarkable milestones in the past 10 months:

5,100+ Slack Members (~1k monthly active members)
500+ companies present in the Community
400+ quickstarts per day
10M+ Docker Pulls
Critical PyPi project (top 1%)
~50 integrations

While the Acryl Team has taken on a tremendous amount of work to drive this Community growth, we wouldn’t be here without the hundreds of Data Practitioners around the world that show up on a daily basis to support one another, spark invigorating conversations, and contribute back to the project itself.

We will be celebrating these wonderful humans during our final Town Hall of the year on Thursday, December 22nd — add it to your calendar here!

Finalizing Our Near-Term Goals

As we wrap up 2022 and kick off 2023, the Acryl Team will have the following areas of focus:

Improvements to the DataHub User Experience

We understand that DataHub’s product experience offers a ton of capabilities that might not be instantly intuitive or discoverable for a new visitor. As new features are built and released, even experienced DataHubists need some mechanism to refresh their knowledge. We’re tackling these challenges via a few projects:

Introduce new user onboarding
Empower end users to find trusted assets quickly
Enable DataHub end users to quickly and seamlessly enrich data entities

Expanding and Supporting the DataHub Community

Our Community is comprised of a wide range of Data Practitioners at various stages of adopting DataHub and implementing a metadata management strategy. Conversations tend to be around getting started with DataHub Quickstart, deploying the platform within an organization, and exploring how DataHub can be the center of a company’s data strategy.

But we know that our Community also includes Data Practitioners who may not yet understand how DataHub would fit into their stack and would benefit from more concrete guidance.

Wherever you might be in your DataHub journey, we’re setting the following goals to ensure we’re better positioned to support you along the way:

Reimagine how we scalably support our rapidly growing Community
Proactively seek ways to expand DataHub awareness among Data Practitioners
Introduce a community advisory board to cultivate robust dialogue, rapid feedback loops, and community-led product/program development

The Acryl Team talks near-term goals

Amping it Up as a Team

With our near-term goals in mind, we took the time to deeply reflect on how we work — as individuals, as a team, and as members of the DataHub Community. This was an opportunity for us to identify ways that we can improve execution, communication, and collaborative, remote product development. Some of the questions we tackled were:

What are the technical and non-technical bottlenecks that get in the way of productivity as we build features in DataHub?
How do we maintain a high degree of autonomy while ensuring coherent design?
How do we maintain a high degree of responsiveness while respecting the global nature of our team?

These were just a few of the questions that were top of mind for us as we navigate the next level of scale for the community and the company. As a direct outcome, we anticipate these newly-defined team norms will lend to improved execution and communication across the board.

Connecting with One Another

Our final — and arguably most important! — goal was to connect with one another IRL. While we take pride in the effort we put into being a remote-first company, we also know there’s no substitution for in-person connection.

Some of my favorite moments included:

Seeing my teammates huddled around a single computer or whiteboard, deep in conversation
Staying up late with the group, watching Twilight and drinking wine, waiting for the lunar eclipse to shine over Yucca Valley at 3 am
Scrambling over massive boulders in Joshua Tree National Park
Soaking up the desert sun moments before taking cover from nonstop rain