Catalog & Cocktails: The Honest, No-BS Data Podcast
Aug 26, 2026 · 7 min · 3 segments
This is the takeaway episode with Bethany Sehon, Enterprise Data Leader at Capital One where she share lessons learned of building data products and ontologies in production long before they became…
Juan SequedaHostTim GasperHost
Bethany SehonGuestI don't know how much you saw us looking down or typing, but we took so many takeaway notes.
What's your soapbox? You talked a little bit about how you guys met in 2019 at the Knowledge Graph Conference, etc., You brought it back to, hey, if you're going to be successful with data, it's going to be because you have solid foundations that are core to driving the business, those solid data foundations.
And you need data that consumers want to consume, whether those are human consumers or those are AI or non-human, whatever kind of phrase you want to use there.
And you are a big proponent and obviously are driving the strategy and the governance around data products at CAP1.
You said it needs to be easy to find, it needs to be easy to understand, it needs to be easy to use.
And there's a bunch of lessons learned that you've found, like exec buy-in has to be there.
I was very excited to see how kind of low a ratio that you have in terms of really as much as possible trying to have one data product manager to data products.
It's in our monthly scorecards when there's a data product manager assigned to more than one data product.
And you actually, it literally, you said it has to come to you for an approval to like let somebody manage more than one, right? So I think that's amazing because it's really a more curated, very deliberate, a very designed approach versus...
Well, let's just call them data products now, and let's try to write up some data contracts.
It's a very reactive and almost just kind of hand-wavy kind of way to do data products instead of really, truly, I think, getting the value out of it.
You mentioned also that you have 40 ontologists now enterprise-wide, maybe even more than that.
And last thing I'll mention is that talking about this process, you mentioned that there was a lot of emerging transformations going on.
I don't know how much you saw us looking down or typing, but we took so many takeaway notes.
What's your soapbox? You talked a little bit about how you guys met in 2019 at the Knowledge Graph Conference, etc., You brought it back to, hey, if you're going to be successful with data, it's going to be because you have solid foundations that are core to driving the business, those solid data foundations.
And you need data that consumers want to consume, whether those are human consumers or those are AI or non-human, whatever kind of phrase you want to use there.
And you are a big proponent and obviously are driving the strategy and the governance around data products at CAP1.
You said it needs to be easy to find, it needs to be easy to understand, it needs to be easy to use.
And there's a bunch of lessons learned that you've found, like exec buy-in has to be there.
I was very excited to see how kind of low a ratio that you have in terms of really as much as possible trying to have one data product manager to data products.
It's in our monthly scorecards when there's a data product manager assigned to more than one data product.
And you actually, it literally, you said it has to come to you for an approval to like let somebody manage more than one, right? So I think that's amazing because it's really a more curated, very deliberate, a very designed approach versus...
Well, let's just call them data products now, and let's try to write up some data contracts.
It's a very reactive and almost just kind of hand-wavy kind of way to do data products instead of really, truly, I think, getting the value out of it.
You mentioned also that you have 40 ontologists now enterprise-wide, maybe even more than that.
And last thing I'll mention is that talking about this process, you mentioned that there was a lot of emerging transformations going on.
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