Shared foundation and safe environment

On this page

Before a steward starts fixing data, they should understand where they are working and what they are looking at.

Learning objective

Build shared fluency in the instance before any record-level decisions are made.

Key ideas

  1. Start safely — use dev or test for learning.
  2. Use a staged mental model — ingest, clean, and explore data progressively.
  3. Understand the core object types — source records, golden records, vocabulary, identifiers, and relationships.
  4. Treat the instance as evidence — the UI is where you confirm what the data actually looks like.

Practical activities

  • Open one business domain and explain what kinds of records it contains.
  • Compare one source record journey to one golden record journey.
  • Identify one place in the instance where a steward can observe a problem before changing anything.

Expected outcome

The learner knows why product learning starts in a safe environment and can describe the steward role as product observation first, correction second.