Every Monday, someone’s dashboard breaks. Nobody knows why.
Most pipeline failures trace back to communication, not code.
Marketing adds a new enum value to a hubshot object. The dashboard breaks on Monday morning. Everyone blames the pipeline, but the pipeline did precisely what it was told to do. Nobody had agreed on what “stable” meant.
Data contracts fix this by making implicit assumptions explicit. A minimum viable contract covers field types, freshness guarantees, breaking change policy, and ownership. You write it down before the first row moves.
On one client project, implementing contracts reduced breaking changes by 60%. Teams weren’t more careful; they just had to have the conversation before shipping.
The usual pushback: “We move too fast for contracts.” But you don’t move fast when analysts spend Monday mornings debugging why the dashboard broke. You move fast when downstream teams trust what they receive.
Think of contracts as the interface your data platform was missing.
Which upstream team broke your pipeline last and did they know you depended on it?