Step 2 assigns the people accountable for your data product: an Owner, which the product must have before you can publish it, plus optional Steward, Custodian, SME, and Producer roles. It is the second of the wizard’s six steps, building on the identity you set in Step 1 — Basics.
What you set here
This step assigns the product’s ownership roles. Primary roles carry core accountability; extended roles cover domain specialists and additional contacts.
| Role | Group | Required to publish | People allowed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Owner | Primary | Yes | One person; defaults to you |
| Steward | Primary | No | One or more |
| Custodian | Primary | No | One or more |
| SME | Extended | No | One or more |
| Producer | Extended | No | One or more |
Every role except Owner shows Unassigned until you set it. The Owner is pre-filled with you, and you can refine all roles later on the product’s Ownership panel.
Why it matters
The ownership roles record who is accountable for the product: who signs off on changes, who is contacted when something breaks, and who answers consumer questions.
You can leave a role blank and set it later. For what each role means, when to assign it, who fits, and how a domain’s roles carry down to its products, see Ownership.
How ownership works here
The wizard shows a short Why this matters panel above the role pickers: roles tell Dawiso who is accountable for the product — who signs off on changes, who is paged when something breaks, and who answers consumer questions.
- An Owner is required to publish. Without one, Publish now on the last step stays disabled. The wizard pre-fills you as Owner, so reassign it here to whoever is actually accountable.
- The Owner is a single person. One Owner per product; the other roles can each hold several people.
- Every other role is optional. Steward, Custodian, SME, and Producer can be left blank — none of them blocks publishing. Set them later on the product’s Ownership panel, where handing over a role is a one-click operation.
- Saving without an Owner is allowed. Save for later parks the product in the announcement state, which has no Owner requirement.
Recommendations
The wizard does not check any of these, but they decide whether the product has real accountability behind it:
- Assign a real person as Owner, not a service account or team alias.
- Add a Steward for meaning and quality, and a Custodian for the pipelines.
- Use SME for domain expertise and Producer for the on-call team.
Clear accountability is what makes a product trustworthy enough to publish. Next, choose the data your product is built from in Step 3 — Data Assets.