Identify high-value decision windows
Customer fraud detection, dynamic inventory routing, and support prioritization are examples where latency directly impacts outcomes. Begin with these use cases.
Engineer for freshness and reliability
Event-driven pipelines need delivery guarantees, schema compatibility, and replay strategies. Real-time without reliability creates operational risk.
- Streaming contracts and schema evolution controls
- Idempotent processing and replay-safe transformations
- Consumer SLAs with freshness and availability targets
Package streams as products
Teams should consume governed real-time data products, not bespoke feeds. Productized streams with documentation and ownership scale adoption across domains.
When done right, real-time data products become a durable competitive advantage for operational decisioning.