Lost and Found Challenge

Turned ownership assignment for 500+ events and 3,000+ tables into a contest, taking ownership coverage from under 10% to fully tracked.

10% → 100%
ownership coverage across 500+ events and 3,000+ tables
2 days
catalog downtime during metadata recovery
40%
of tables had been queried in six months

Ownership coverage

Before the contest: under 10%

After: fully tracked

500+ events and 3,000+ tables.

Where it started

Tables and events with an owner: under 10%

Tables queried in six months: 40%

Monitored: under 10%

The numbers that justified the contest format.

What happened, in order

<10% ownership

Contest launched
leaderboard + prize

Metadata wiped
2 days down

Recovered from S3

Ownership capture automated
going forward

The risk, and what happened

Risk	How it was handled	Result
Value. No ownership meant no accountability for data quality, monitoring, or safe deprecation. Continued erosion of trust in the data as unowned assets piled up.	The task itself was genuinely boring, so instead of mandating it, built a leaderboard contest with a prize.	Ownership coverage from under 10% to fully tracked, and automated ownership capture on every new table or event.

My role. Owned the contest design, the rules, the roadmap prioritization, and the automation that now captures ownership by default going forward.

What went wrong. A filter change accidentally deleted all user-generated metadata mid-challenge, and the catalog was down for two days during recovery. Daily S3 backups meant nothing was permanently lost.

Product leader with a data scientist past · Zapier, Clearbit, HubSpot

Product doc: ale-cabrera.com/portfolio/lost-and-found-challenge