Data mesh or centralized platform: decide who owns a new team's pipeline

A new team wants their own data pipeline. Nobody's sure if it should live on your shared platform or run on something the new team owns outright.

Intermediate to advancedRead 6 minDoing: a few hours, plus a short conversation with the requesting team's lead7 steps

▶ Start

What you'll have at the end

A one-page decision naming who owns build, on-call, and quality for the new pipeline

Before you start

You need

A concrete new-pipeline request from a team that doesn't run pipelines of its own yet, plus enough access to see your shared platform's open request queue and today's self-serve tooling.

Not covered

Persuading either team the answer is the right one, or a plan for moving your whole organization onto data mesh; this only sets ownership for this one new pipeline.

Leans on

7 steps

Where to go next

Turn a hard-to-reverse platform choice into a written ADR

when this ownership call is hard to reverse later, turn it into a full ADR instead of a one-pager

Checked 26 Aug 2026

Part of the Data Engineering Core cookbook