The Metadata Moment: When 'Where Is This Data?' Costs You Two Engineers

Two full-time equivalents on your data team do nothing but answer questions all day.

I watched it happen at a client last quarter. 10-person data team. We tracked interruptions for two weeks. 20% of their time - gone. Same questions, every week. “Can you pull last quarter’s revenue by region?” “Is this table still active?” “Why doesn’t this number match finance?”

That’s 2 FTE-months. Every single month. Engineers you hired to build pipelines and ship data products, spending their days as a human search engine.

And they know it. It’s one of the top reasons data people leave. Nobody studied engineering to answer the same Slack message forty times.

We rolled out a searchable data catalog. Ownership tags, definitions, lineage. Within three months, that same team documented 200 hours per month in saved interruptions. Engineers went back to actual engineering.

The biggest hurdle wasn’t the tool. It was getting domain owners to write the definitions. We started with five critical datasets. Documented them. Made it searchable. Then expanded from there.

What’s the most-asked question your data team gets that a catalog could answer?