Stop Arguing About Numbers: How Zalando Scales Governance With Unity Catalog and Metric Views

At Zalando’s scale—serving over 50M European customers via a decentralized microservices architecture—data governance quickly turns into a "Data Swamp." Domain teams shipped fast, but without a unified semantic layer, "Net Revenue" on a marketing dashboard rarely matched the finance report. We faced a familiar dilemma: centralize and create bottlenecks, or stay decentralized and lose trust in our numbers.This session will focus on our implementation of Unity Catalog, scaled across an organization with over 1,000 data engineers. This setup fosters team autonomy, enabling rapid data creation. We will also detail the governance mechanisms we've put in place to facilitate data sharing while maintaining minimal compliance risk.We’ll then go deep into how we use metric views to move business logic out of siloed BI tools and directly into the lakehouse. This metric-as-code approach ensures that whether users query via notebooks, dashboards or AI agents, they get the same trusted answer.