New in Avo: Event Variants, Global Requirements

TL;DR: Announcing two new product releases to enable global governance with domain-driven ownership.

If you’ve been following Avo lately, you know we’ve been thinking deeply about how we can help companies unlock data governance at scale. 

Data governance is hard. Really hard. That’s why we built Avo in the first place, because we’re familiar with the challenges of designing and implementing systems that enforce high quality data. It’s even harder at scale, where the data team becomes overwhelmed with review requests and audit checks that slow down the data workflow—or worse, is bypassed altogether by product teams who must deliver data quickly. 

Yali Sassoon, Co-founder & Chief Strategy Officer at Snowplow summed up this problem well in his recent substack:

In order to use data effectively in an organization, there must be clear ownership for each stage of the data value chain. This is difficult to achieve in practice, as many organizations overload their central data team with responsibility for the entire data value chain. Data contracts are designed to solve this bottleneck in data teams , by providing a clean way of assigning ownership for the different parts of the value chain to data producers and consumers.

So the solution, according to Yali and others, can come in the form of a “data contract”, or in other words: a way of allocating up responsibility for data governance and reducing the burden on a central data team. At Avo, you could say we’re building our own vision of a systemized data contract: a solution that facilitates “global governance, with domain-driven ownership” through an intuitive workflow. 

With this in mind, we’re thrilled to introduce two exciting new features that bring us a step closer to this vision: 

➡️ Global Requirements: implement Global Events across multiple tracking plan namespaces in your organization;

➡️ Event Variants: create variations on events to suit different scenarios and reduce the scope of tracking plan changes.

There’s plenty to dig into here, let’s dive in!

Streamline global governance with Global Requirements (Beta) 📫

In large organizations with multiple products or subsidiary companies, it isn’t always desirable or even feasible to adhere to a single tracking plan namespace. 

Let’s imagine you’re on the global governance team at Disney. You want to ensure high standards for tracking and data quality across all your platforms, products, and digital assets. But the TV streaming platform, Disney+, will involve very different user behaviors from, say Disneyland.com. Forcing data practitioners from these totally different teams to ascribe to the same, rigid schema would probably slow things down and frustrate Product Leaders who want to move quickly. 

To solve this problem, we’ve made it possible for Avo customers to create multiple workspaces within a single organization. 

From now on, there’ll be two types of workspaces you can set up within the Avo platform:

• Local Workspace: A standard Avo workspace where tracking is defined, implemented and monitored.‍
• Global Requirements Workspace: A workspace where a central governance team is able to define core events and properties that should be sent consistently from some or all local workspaces under the organization.

Local workspaces can and should own their individual Tracking Plans. However, there may be times when a central governance or data team needs to enforce certain events to be tracked in a uniform across all workspaces and domains. For this, we have introduced Global Requirements. 

How it works: a look at the Global Requirements Workflow

1. Define

Once you’ve set up a Global Requirements Workspace, you can draft changes in a branch. Just like in a standard Avo branch, you’re able to define the global events and properties you want to see implemented across workspaces. For each event, you can decide which workspaces in your organization should adopt these requirements. 

2. Review

At this point, you can invite collaborators to review your branch and request feedback. You can invite owners of each local workspace that will be impacted by your proposed changes, to highlight and mitigate conflicts between global and local data structures. 

3. Merge and push

After the branch is reviewed and you’re happy to proceed, you can “merge and push” your new requirements to the Local Workspaces you intend to affect. Doing so will:

• Merge these new requirements into the main branch of the Global Requirements Workspace
• Automatically create branches in your intended Local Workspaces containing the proposed changes for that workspace.

For companies governing data at scale, Global Requirements is a powerful new feature we hope will make global governance easier, faster, and more transparent for everyone involved. 

Right now we’re inviting our customers to try out Global Requirements via our Beta program. If you’d like to get your hands on this feature, let us know by sending an email to support@avo.sh. 🤩

Iterate on existing data structures with Event Variants 🧪

We’re happy to announce that Event Variants are officially out of Beta, and immediately available to Avo customers on Team and Enterprise plans. If you’re not a paid Avo user, you can explore Event Variants via a free Team plan trial.

What are Event Variants?

Event Variants make it possible for domain owners to make a variation of an existing event to suit a specific scenario. 

With Event Variants, anyone can spin up a new variant to add and remove properties. Soon, you’ll be able to add more variations like pinned properties, triggers, and make comments on variants too. 

We’re still evolving Event Variants to make them as valuable as possible. What would you like to be able to iterate on in your event variations? Let us know!

How it works

Creating an event variant is easy and fast. Click on an event to enter the Event Details view, and you’ll now see an option under “Variants” to add “New Variant”.

Simply name your variant and hit “Create variant” to enter a new view, where you’ll be able to configure the variant according to your specific needs or scenario. Note that an event variant inherits its base event name and properties, but you can remove unwanted properties and add new ones as needed. 

If you’re using Codegen for implementation, you’ll see a new Codegen function for the variant, containing all the variations you’ve applied. Otherwise you’ll see a pseudocode snippet following the name of the base event, again with the iterations you’ve added to this variant. 

Event Variants is a powerful, intuitive way to iterate on existing data structures while minimizing the impact on the existing  tracking plan. We can’t wait to hear how you’ll use Event Variants–hopefully to empower domain-driven teams. 

If you’re curious about Event Variants but you’re not on an Avo Team or Enterprise plan, you can request a demo to learn more.