Design a self-serve discovery experience in Atlan for business users who never open the data catalogue.

Introduction

Data catalogues were built for data teams. Engineers, analysts and stewards open Atlan to search assets, read lineage and maintain documentation. But the people who make most decisions with data, sales leaders, marketers, finance managers, rarely open a catalogue. They ask colleagues on Slack, "Which dashboard has the right revenue number?", or they pick whatever they find first. That leads to inconsistent numbers in meetings and endless questions to the data team.

The question asks us to design a self-serve discovery experience in Atlan for business users who never open the data catalogue. This is the "last mile" of data governance: if trusted definitions and certified dashboards do not reach business users where they work, the catalogue has limited impact.

Step 1

Clarify Questions (3 minutes)

• Who exactly are the business users?

• Hypothetical answer: Non-technical managers and analysts in sales, marketing and finance who consume dashboards and ask data questions.
• Impact: No SQL; natural language and familiar tools.

• What is the goal: fewer questions to the data team, more use of certified assets, or better decisions?

• Hypothetical answer: Increase the share of business questions answered with certified, trusted assets, and reduce repetitive questions to the data team.
• Impact: The design must surface trust signals clearly.

• Where do these users work?

• Hypothetical answer: Slack or Microsoft Teams, BI tools (Tableau, Power BI, Looker), and increasingly AI assistants.
• Impact: We will design for those surfaces.

• What does Atlan already have?

• Hypothetical answer: A business glossary, certified assets, a browser extension that shows context inside BI tools, Atlan AI for natural-language search, and integrations with Slack and Teams.
• Impact: We can build on existing capabilities.

Propose the Goal

Help business users find and trust the right metric or dashboard in under a minute, without leaving the tools they use.

Define the Scope

Slack/Teams and BI tool surfaces, natural-language search over certified assets and glossary terms, for a pilot of sales and finance users at enterprise customers.