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        <title>Trevor McCormick Blog</title>
        <link>https://trmccormick.com/blog</link>
        <description>Trevor McCormick Blog</description>
        <lastBuildDate>Sun, 08 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT</lastBuildDate>
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        <copyright>Copyright © 2026 Trevor McCormick.</copyright>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Data Products Beyond Instrumentation]]></title>
            <link>https://trmccormick.com/blog/data-products-beyond-instrumentation</link>
            <guid>https://trmccormick.com/blog/data-products-beyond-instrumentation</guid>
            <pubDate>Sun, 08 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[This series started with a question: what is instrumentation? It ends with a bigger one: what does the data product function look like when it grows beyond telemetry, and what does it mean to be a product manager in this space?]]></description>
            <author>trevor.ryan.mccormick@gmail.com (Trevor McCormick)</author>
            <category>Strategy &amp; Roadmapping</category>
            <category>Leadership &amp; Teams</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[From Data PM to Data Product Leader]]></title>
            <link>https://trmccormick.com/blog/from-data-pm-to-leader</link>
            <guid>https://trmccormick.com/blog/from-data-pm-to-leader</guid>
            <pubDate>Sun, 01 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[You're the best individual contributor on the data team. You know every schema, every pipeline, every dashboard. Your manager leaves. Leadership asks if you want the role. You say yes. Three months later, you haven't written a schema definition in weeks and you're not sure what you do anymore.]]></description>
            <author>trevor.ryan.mccormick@gmail.com (Trevor McCormick)</author>
            <category>Leadership &amp; Teams</category>
            <category>Product Management</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Build vs Buy for Data Infrastructure]]></title>
            <link>https://trmccormick.com/blog/build-vs-buy</link>
            <guid>https://trmccormick.com/blog/build-vs-buy</guid>
            <pubDate>Sun, 25 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[Your team spent six months building a custom event validation pipeline. The vendor you evaluated in week one now offers the same feature for $40K/year. Your custom solution costs $200K/year in engineering time to maintain.]]></description>
            <author>trevor.ryan.mccormick@gmail.com (Trevor McCormick)</author>
            <category>Strategy &amp; Roadmapping</category>
            <category>Platform &amp; Architecture</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Org Design for Data Product Teams]]></title>
            <link>https://trmccormick.com/blog/org-design-for-data-product-teams</link>
            <guid>https://trmccormick.com/blog/org-design-for-data-product-teams</guid>
            <pubDate>Sun, 18 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[You have eight product managers, twelve data engineers, and four analysts. They all report to different people. Nobody agrees on priorities. Every cross-team project takes three months of alignment before anyone writes code.]]></description>
            <author>trevor.ryan.mccormick@gmail.com (Trevor McCormick)</author>
            <category>Leadership &amp; Teams</category>
            <category>Strategy &amp; Roadmapping</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Building the Business Case for Data Products]]></title>
            <link>https://trmccormick.com/blog/building-the-business-case</link>
            <guid>https://trmccormick.com/blog/building-the-business-case</guid>
            <pubDate>Sun, 11 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[Your VP of Engineering asks: "What's the ROI of the instrumentation platform?" You don't have an answer. Neither does anyone else on the data team. This is why the team keeps losing headcount.]]></description>
            <author>trevor.ryan.mccormick@gmail.com (Trevor McCormick)</author>
            <category>Strategy &amp; Roadmapping</category>
            <category>Leadership &amp; Teams</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[The Data Product Portfolio]]></title>
            <link>https://trmccormick.com/blog/the-data-product-portfolio</link>
            <guid>https://trmccormick.com/blog/the-data-product-portfolio</guid>
            <pubDate>Sun, 04 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[You own six data products. Two are critical to the business. One is used by three people. One hasn't been updated in eight months. You treat them all the same in planning. That's not portfolio management. That's neglect dressed as fairness.]]></description>
            <author>trevor.ryan.mccormick@gmail.com (Trevor McCormick)</author>
            <category>Strategy &amp; Roadmapping</category>
            <category>Product Management</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[When Your Clickstream Schema Needs a Rewrite]]></title>
            <link>https://trmccormick.com/blog/when-your-clickstream-schema-needs-a-rewrite</link>
            <guid>https://trmccormick.com/blog/when-your-clickstream-schema-needs-a-rewrite</guid>
            <pubDate>Sun, 28 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[Your clickstream schema launched with 12 fields. Three years later it has 47 optional fields, six inter-field dependencies, and a Slack channel dedicated to debugging why containerViewId is null on Samsung TVs. You need a product decision, not a technical one.]]></description>
            <author>trevor.ryan.mccormick@gmail.com (Trevor McCormick)</author>
            <category>Schema Design</category>
            <category>Platform &amp; Architecture</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Communicating Up: The Internal Marketing of Data Work]]></title>
            <link>https://trmccormick.com/blog/communicating-up</link>
            <guid>https://trmccormick.com/blog/communicating-up</guid>
            <pubDate>Sun, 21 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[Your team shipped 47 schema migrations, 12 new event types, and a consent architecture overhaul. Your VP's quarterly review slide says "analytics improvements."]]></description>
            <author>trevor.ryan.mccormick@gmail.com (Trevor McCormick)</author>
            <category>Leadership &amp; Teams</category>
            <category>Strategy &amp; Roadmapping</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[The Instrumentation Roadmap]]></title>
            <link>https://trmccormick.com/blog/the-instrumentation-roadmap</link>
            <guid>https://trmccormick.com/blog/the-instrumentation-roadmap</guid>
            <pubDate>Sun, 14 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[Three product teams want new analytics events this quarter. You also need to deprecate 40 legacy events and write documentation for the 200 events already in production. Your roadmap is the product strategy that decides what ships and what waits.]]></description>
            <author>trevor.ryan.mccormick@gmail.com (Trevor McCormick)</author>
            <category>Strategy &amp; Roadmapping</category>
            <category>Product Management</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Managing a Team of Data Product Managers]]></title>
            <link>https://trmccormick.com/blog/managing-a-team-of-dpms</link>
            <guid>https://trmccormick.com/blog/managing-a-team-of-dpms</guid>
            <pubDate>Sun, 07 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[One data PM owns clickstream. Another owns video quality. A third owns experimentation. They all compete for the same engineering resources, and none of them are shipping fast enough.]]></description>
            <author>trevor.ryan.mccormick@gmail.com (Trevor McCormick)</author>
            <category>Leadership &amp; Teams</category>
            <category>Product Management</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[What I've Learned Building Data Products at Scale]]></title>
            <link>https://trmccormick.com/blog/what-ive-learned</link>
            <guid>https://trmccormick.com/blog/what-ive-learned</guid>
            <pubDate>Sun, 30 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[After three years of building instrumentation at Disney+, these are the things I wish someone had told me on day one. They're product management lessons, learned through data work.]]></description>
            <author>trevor.ryan.mccormick@gmail.com (Trevor McCormick)</author>
            <category>Product Management</category>
            <category>Leadership &amp; Teams</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Hiring and Growing Instrumentation Teams]]></title>
            <link>https://trmccormick.com/blog/hiring-and-growing-instrumentation-teams</link>
            <guid>https://trmccormick.com/blog/hiring-and-growing-instrumentation-teams</guid>
            <pubDate>Sun, 23 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[There is no "instrumentation engineer" job posting template. There is no "data product manager" career ladder at most companies. Here is how we built the team, the roles, and the hiring process from scratch.]]></description>
            <author>trevor.ryan.mccormick@gmail.com (Trevor McCormick)</author>
            <category>Leadership &amp; Teams</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Migration Without Breaking Everything]]></title>
            <link>https://trmccormick.com/blog/migration-without-breaking-everything</link>
            <guid>https://trmccormick.com/blog/migration-without-breaking-everything</guid>
            <pubDate>Sun, 16 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[We migrated 200+ analytics events from a legacy system to a modern one. The business requirement was zero data loss during the transition. I ran it like a product launch.]]></description>
            <author>trevor.ryan.mccormick@gmail.com (Trevor McCormick)</author>
            <category>Platform &amp; Architecture</category>
            <category>Schema Design</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[The Art of the Analytics Code Review]]></title>
            <link>https://trmccormick.com/blog/the-art-of-the-analytics-code-review</link>
            <guid>https://trmccormick.com/blog/the-art-of-the-analytics-code-review</guid>
            <pubDate>Sun, 09 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[The code compiles. The tests pass. The analytics event fires with an empty string where the content ID should be. Nobody catches this in code review because nobody is checking whether the data tells the truth.]]></description>
            <author>trevor.ryan.mccormick@gmail.com (Trevor McCormick)</author>
            <category>Privacy &amp; Governance</category>
            <category>Product Management</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Data Governance for Instrumentation]]></title>
            <link>https://trmccormick.com/blog/data-governance-for-instrumentation</link>
            <guid>https://trmccormick.com/blog/data-governance-for-instrumentation</guid>
            <pubDate>Sun, 02 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[Governance sounds like bureaucracy. In practice, the absence of governance means your data warehouse has 47 different spellings of "content_id" and 14 teams who stopped trusting the numbers.]]></description>
            <author>trevor.ryan.mccormick@gmail.com (Trevor McCormick)</author>
            <category>Privacy &amp; Governance</category>
            <category>Schema Design</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[In-App Messaging Telemetry]]></title>
            <link>https://trmccormick.com/blog/in-app-messaging-telemetry</link>
            <guid>https://trmccormick.com/blog/in-app-messaging-telemetry</guid>
            <pubDate>Sun, 26 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[Marketing sends 50 million in-app messages per week. Without telemetry on impressions, dismissals, and taps, they have no idea if any of them work. We didn't instrument all of it at once. We shipped impressions first, learned from the gaps, and built from there.]]></description>
            <author>trevor.ryan.mccormick@gmail.com (Trevor McCormick)</author>
            <category>Experimentation &amp; Growth</category>
            <category>Product Management</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Experimentation as Infrastructure]]></title>
            <link>https://trmccormick.com/blog/experimentation-as-infrastructure</link>
            <guid>https://trmccormick.com/blog/experimentation-as-infrastructure</guid>
            <pubDate>Sun, 19 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[Feature flags are the easy part. The hard part is knowing whether the experiment data flowing through them is correct. And the hardest part is knowing when to experiment at all.]]></description>
            <author>trevor.ryan.mccormick@gmail.com (Trevor McCormick)</author>
            <category>Experimentation &amp; Growth</category>
            <category>Platform &amp; Architecture</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Real User Monitoring]]></title>
            <link>https://trmccormick.com/blog/real-user-monitoring</link>
            <guid>https://trmccormick.com/blog/real-user-monitoring</guid>
            <pubDate>Sun, 12 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[Synthetic tests pass. Lighthouse scores look great. Real users on a 2019 Samsung TV on hotel Wi-Fi tell a different story. And when you look at the RUM data, it tells you things about your product that no user interview ever would.]]></description>
            <author>trevor.ryan.mccormick@gmail.com (Trevor McCormick)</author>
            <category>Monitoring &amp; Quality</category>
            <category>Platform &amp; Architecture</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Building a Data-Informed Culture]]></title>
            <link>https://trmccormick.com/blog/building-a-data-informed-culture</link>
            <guid>https://trmccormick.com/blog/building-a-data-informed-culture</guid>
            <pubDate>Sun, 05 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[You built the dashboards. Nobody looks at them. The problem is not the data. The problem is that you shipped a tool without understanding your users.]]></description>
            <author>trevor.ryan.mccormick@gmail.com (Trevor McCormick)</author>
            <category>Metrics &amp; Measurement</category>
            <category>Leadership &amp; Teams</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[The Analytics Pipeline]]></title>
            <link>https://trmccormick.com/blog/the-analytics-pipeline</link>
            <guid>https://trmccormick.com/blog/the-analytics-pipeline</guid>
            <pubDate>Sun, 28 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[A user taps "Play" on their phone. 400 milliseconds later, the event lands in a Kafka topic 2,000 miles away. Your PM asks why yesterday's funnel numbers look off. The answer lives somewhere in the five systems between the user's finger and the chart on their screen.]]></description>
            <author>trevor.ryan.mccormick@gmail.com (Trevor McCormick)</author>
            <category>Platform &amp; Architecture</category>
            <category>Schema Design</category>
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