From Broadcast to Breakthrough: Inside the BBC’s Data Product Transformation

Challenge: Adapting a legacy broadcast giant to an agile data organization

The BBC is one of the most recognizable media organizations in the world. But in an era where audiences expect personalization, instant access, and intelligent recommendations across platforms, heritage alone isn’t enough. The organization has embarked on an ambitious reinvention—not just as a content leader, but as a digital-first powerhouse.

That transformation began with a stark realization: data, in its current form, was a barrier.

“It’s not that we don’t have enough data. We have too much data. We don’t know what to trust.”

—Nathalie Berdat, Head of Data and AI Governance, BBC

Nathalie Berdat joined the BBC two years ago as employee number one in the data governance function. What she encountered was a familiar challenge: data teams drowning in technical debt, business stakeholders skeptical of analytics, and a fractured ecosystem with conflicting dashboards and redundant tables.

Despite growing data volumes and increasing demands—from AI models, regulators, and audiences alike—the organization couldn’t scale insight at the pace it needed.

The BBC’s problem wasn’t scarcity. It was trust.

Objectives: Reimagine data from the ground up

To close the widening data gap, the BBC defined a new strategy—one that aligned data capabilities with business goals and organizational values. The mission was to build a scalable, sustainable, and user-centered data operating model.

The transformation focused on three strategic goals:

• Shift from data volume to data value: Prioritize insights over ingestion, and measure success by decisions made, not dashboards delivered.

• Adopt a product-oriented data model: Package trusted datasets into discoverable, reusable data products designed witha clear purpose and ownership.

• Enable cultural and technical scalability: Empower cross-functional teams through decentralized ownership and centralized governance, supported by intuitive tooling like Alation.

Implementation: Building a data product operating model—powered by Alation

Rather than fully adopting the popular but complex data mesh model, the BBC chose a pragmatic path: taking inspiration from data mesh principles while tailoring its own “data product operating model.”

At its core, the new model emphasized decentralization of data ownership—placing responsibility in the hands of domain-aligned teams—and centralization of governance and infrastructure. This dual approach ensured agility without sacrificing consistency.

“We said we’re going to be practical. Data mesh is great, but there’s often a gap between theory and implementation. Our focus was to enable product and engineering teams to improve experiences through trusted, usable data.”

—Nathalie Berdat, Head of Data and AI Governance, BBC

From ad-hoc analytics to trusted data products

To illustrate this shift, consider one of the BBC’s flagship efforts: the creation of a unified Search Metrics data product.

Previously, understanding how users searched across platforms (mobile, web, TV) was nearly impossible. Analysts had created disparate tables with inconsistent methodologies. The result? Mistrust, misalignment, and missed opportunities.

The new data product strategy changed that. The team:

• Ran discovery sprints to understand real user and analyst needs

• Created a “gold” dataset with standardized definitions, aligned to strategic KPIs

• Used Alation as a discovery layer, documentation hub, and single source of truth

“We can trust it. We can use it. We’ve all aligned on the right definitions… It’s your gold data—your source of truth.”

—Nathalie Berdat, Head of Data and AI Governance, BBC

Alation became critical in this transformation—offering more than just cataloging. Its intuitive UI, rapid implementation, and powerful governance features allowed analysts and product managers alike to explore and adopt data products with confidence.

“Alation is now really part of the workflow… Not just, ‘Let me double check,’ but ‘Let me start there.’”

—Nathalie Berdat, Head of Data and AI Governance, BBC

Results: Culture change, operational clarity, and accelerated adoption

The shift to data products wasn’t just structural. It was cultural.

Success was no longer defined by how many tables an analyst maintained. Instead, value came from enabling decisions, aligning to strategy, and abstracting data complexity to serve broader audiences.

“The measure of success is having fewer tables—not one per query. It’s about abstracting the messiness and delivering something useful to a product manager or engineer.”

—Nathalie Berdat, Head of Data and AI Governance, BBC

Rapid rollout with Alation

• Signed in November

• Implemented by March

• 200+ users in week one, now over 500 and growing

This was no one-off spike. It signaled real adoption—driven by strong use cases, a compelling vision, and Alation’s frictionless experience.

Stronger Alignment with Business Value

• Faster insights into user behavior

• Greater trust in metrics and KPIs

• Improved personalization and experience design

And perhaps most importantly, teams across the BBC—from product to UX research to engineering—now engage with data products built to answer strategic questions, not just technical ones.

Conclusion: From incubation to scale—what’s next for the BBC

The BBC’s data journey is structured in deliberate phases:

• Incubation – Start small with high-impact use cases like Search. Build foundational capabilities. Demonstrate value.

• Sustainment – Embed governance, tooling, and team practices. Create a repeatable model.

• Scaling – Expand to new domains. Increase velocity and consistency. Institutionalize the data product mindset.

This approach ensures each data product isn’t just technically sound—but meaningful, reusable, and strategically aligned.

Looking ahead, the BBC is exploring further opportunities to embed data product thinking across its development lifecycle—from informing sprint planning to measuring product success metrics.

The organization is also deepening its commitment to responsible AI, data ethics, and personalization—all of which depend on a foundation of trustworthy, discoverable data.

“We need to stop talking about having more data… It’s not about volume. It’s about insights.”

—Nathalie Berdat, Head of Data and AI Governance, BBC

Lessons for the enterprise

For data leaders navigating similar challenges, the BBC’s experience offers several key takeaways:

• Start with the problem, not the data. Build only what solves something real.

• Avoid premature scaling. Prove value before expanding.

• Governance matters—but so does usability. Choose platforms that make doing the right thing easy.

• Adoption is earned. An unused data product is a failure of storytelling, not just design.

• Shift the mindset. From “owning assets” to “delivering outcomes.”

The BBC’s journey underscores that true digital transformation isn’t just about new tools or data pipelines. It’s about trust, usability, and clarity—about turning sprawling data into strategic action.

And with a robust partnership in Alation, they’re not just transforming how the BBC works with data. They’re reshaping the way public service media operates in the digital age.

Curious to learn how you can leverage a data catalog to launch and scale  data products? Book a demo with us to learn more.