Shipping velocity is directly proportional to data structure quality, especially in the age where UI can be increasingly treated as an ephemeral asset. More practically, this includes: - the type of store you use e.g. relational, graph etc. - the way you structure your data into entities and relationships - the way you capture information for e.g. you might want to store a status as a boolean (e.g. is_disabled) or you could choose to infer this info from a timestamp (e.g. disabled_at), both have pros and cons - the way you connect cross-platform datasets e.g. database, storage, logs, etc. - the way you structure your API, construct queries and consume data Being data-first is a cheat code to increasing your shipping velocity. Bad data decisions can be extremely painful to undo and when you start to see them clearly, you can never go back.