In this episode of Product Unplugged, host Mike Belsito sits down with Nimit Bhardwaj, a data product manager at Booking.com, to discuss how his product team faced a high-stakes data quality issue and walked us through the process they used to solve it.
Key Takeaways
- “Treat data like a product.” Ownership doesn’t end at building features—it extends to the data those features create.
- Short-term fixes matter. A tactical “quarantine” service helped buy time while driving long-term system change.
- Don’t underestimate 1%. A 1% error rate in financial data still led to 40,000+ manual corrections each month.
- Data quality isn’t one team’s job. True success came when upstream teams took responsibility for their data’s accuracy.
- Measurement is meaningless without messaging. 99% sounds fine—until you translate it into delayed payments and angry suppliers.
Chapters
00:00 – Intro & Meet Nimtt Bardwage from Booking.com
01:45 – The big data quality problem that couldn’t be ignored
04:00 – Root causes: legacy systems, knowledge gaps & migration chaos
06:00 – When 99% data accuracy is a massive risk
08:00 – The two-track approach: tactical + strategic
10:00 – Building a quarantine service to protect financial systems
12:00 – From patch to platform: scaling into strategic change
14:30 – The results: automation, ownership, and 12x improvement
16:00 – What we’d do differently next time
18:00 – Common pitfalls to avoid when dealing with data quality
20:00 – Everyone owns the data
