Use case roles

Use case roles aim to develop specific analyses or outcomes with the data in Foundry. Organizational domains, program teams, or a single project manager can manage a use case team. Management by a single project manager is especially common in the early phases of the Foundry journey.

Domain lead

Domain leads aren't necessarily in a use case team or role, but they are organizational leads who own the success of a particular organizational domain's return on investment (ROI). This includes organizational domains at scale, which often contain multiple work streams. Domain leads work closely with members of the program team to provide strategic input to use case prioritization conversations, which should occur on a regular basis.

Workstream lead

Workstream leads are responsible for managing the production of economies of scale (through information sharing, such as developed analyses and models, and ontology tables), and ensuring the appropriate competencies are deployed against adjacent use cases (e.g. deploying a set of applications to the same user base). This role becomes helpful once a given organization's organizational domain contains a considerable number of use cases.

Use case lead

Use case leads are project managers who work alongside engineers contributing to a project. Use case leads ensure the alignment of both technical and organizational goals, adherence to best practice standards for development on the platform, and coordination between other project teams.

They are responsible for

  • use case ROI, execution, and end-user adoption;
  • managing the project-specific permissions and access controls; and
  • coordinating the team to ensure project issues, health checks, schedules, and application support is available for end users.

Product owner

Product owners are accountable for the development roadmap and implementation of use case features, which should be identified, confirmed, and documented during the planning stage. The product owner is a key stakeholder to involve in the early stages of product development to ensure they're aware of organizational requirements and how the product can best benefit its end-users. Product owners are the main points of contact for individuals who wish to understand the progress and outcomes of product development.

Organizational/subject matter expert

Organizational SMEs provide expertise and guidance from their organizational domain to ensure project efforts are aligned with organizational needs. Often this person is a power user of legacy tools who deeply understand the current workflows for a given problem domain, the shortcomings associated with those current operations, and thoughts on how to optimize the user experience and workflow to maximize ROI.

Use case developer

Use case developers are engineers and analysts who own the development of a use case. They use data sourced from the ontology layer. Use case developers often have specialties depending on the project scope, including:

  • Data analysts:
    • Scope, design, and implement both ad hoc and templated analyses, reports, visualizations, and dashboards to answer critical questions.
    • Perform one-off quality and consistency checks during pipeline building.
  • Data engineers:
    • Author transformations, optimizations, and manipulations of datasets to meet the needs of the use case and its outcomes.
    • Monitor and curate the most important datasets in one or multiple projects, adhering to the central Program Team’s guidelines.
    • Contribute back to Ontology according to defined contribution process.
  • Data scientist/machine learning experts:
    • Perform modeling, machine learning, classification, and regressions to enrich and visualize data in service of decision making workflows.
  • Application developers:
    • Develop decision-driven interfaces in Workshop, Slate, Quiver, and Object Explorer.
    • Define object types and their associated actions in the Ontology Manager.
    • Build external applications with third-party tools using the Foundry Gateway API.

The number of required use case developers is heavily dependent on the individual use case's goals and requirements and the skillsets of available use case developers.

End user

End users and self-service users work in developed workflows, applications, or data artifacts to fulfill their regular organizational responsibilities, including ad hoc analyses, reporting, operational improvements, and daily decision-making.