Celebrate Deleting Data: Trust, Privacy and the Data MVP

29 Oct

Most teams celebrate collecting data. Very few celebrate deleting it.

Data is about trust: trust in how it’s collected, stored, managed through its life cycle and, ultimately, deleted once it’s no longer needed. Trust is both an input and an outcome, and that’s the essence of good data stewardship.

In practice, good customer data acquisition comes down to three principles: just enough data, fit for purpose; stored safely and securely; and time-bound retention policies, linked to business need and customer tenure.

These principles were at the heart of my recent conversation with Rebecca Fairlamb, opening Product Economics’ Secure by Design webinar series. It’s the part of the conversation I’d want every practitioner working with data and privacy to hear.

Three things I’d take from it:

→ Give every data field one sentence: why we hold it, how long we keep it, and what the customer thinks it’s for.
→ Celebrate deleting data as much as collecting it. Less data means less risk, less cost and a smaller blast radius if something goes wrong.
→ Trust is an output of how a team works, so ownership has to sit with the product team, not only with compliance.

When launching a new proposition, define your “data MVP”: how much data is just enough, and why each field is justified. And remember that an MVP is about learning in the real world, with real customers, not in a simulated environment that never touches them.

That’s one of the principles in my book, Product Truths: Five Principles for Building Products That Work at Scale, and one of the key themes I discuss in the session. You can watch it in the sneak peek clip below.

→ Watch the full recording on YouTube