Introducing Causeway: the paved path for our data creators

Causeway is how we are evolving our internal data platform from a warehouse you file tickets against into a self-service surface our creators actually want to build on.

Why now

The lake is not the problem. The roads are. Our creators (analysts, scientists, engineers, product operators) spend too much of their week negotiating access, reconciling schemas, and chasing down whether a number is trustworthy. Causeway is the paved path across the work they already do.

What ships first

• Catalog. One place to find every governed dataset, with its contract, steward, and classification visible on the row.
• Contracts. Schema, freshness, retention, and policy declared alongside the data, checked on every run.
• Lineage. Upstream-to-consumption, semantic-first, wired into dbt and the metric layer.

The first release will not be everything. It will be enough that a new creator can promote their first table this week instead of next quarter.