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CONCEPT Cited by 1 source

Dual-owner metric governance

Definition

Dual-owner metric governance is an ownership model where every governed metric has two mandatory, team-based owners with distinct responsibilities:

Role Who Responsible for
Business Owner Data Analyst / Data Scientist team Metric health — provides written + SQL definitions, maintains the definition on a regular cadence, defines allowed dimensions/granularities, gathers stakeholder approval
Operational Owner Data Engineer / Data Scientist team Data health — ensures quality of underlying tables, provides on-call support, creates/maintains DQ checks, runs backfills, communicates delays/changes

Both owners must approve any change to a metric's definition. This requirement serves two purposes: 1. Informed and coordinated action — all relevant parties are aware and can make reactive adjustments 2. Accountability and quality control — each party may be aware of critical nuances the other is not

(Source: sources/2026-06-10-lyft-metric-semantic-layer)

Design decisions

  • Teams, not individuals — owners must be teams to survive org changes, rotations, and attrition
  • Dual sign-off — prevents silent drift from either the business-logic or data-engineering side
  • Distinct expertise — the Business Owner knows what the metric should measure; the Operational Owner knows whether the underlying data can support that measurement reliably

Relationship to separation of duties

This is a data-platform-specific instance of the broader concepts/separation-of-duties-data-governance principle, applied at the metric-definition level rather than at the data-access level.

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