dbt Summit
All on demand sessions
On demand session

The platform team said no — dbt won with “yes” - story of governance, autonomy, and scale

At Delivery Hero, dbt adoption came from customer teams pushing past platform caution, not from a platform mandate.

Recorded at dbt Summit · 2026Breakout session archive
01

Overview

Breakout session · 2026

At Delivery Hero (70+ countries, 50+ teams, 60+ PB of data, 300k+ tables), domain teams run their own pipelines while needing central governance. A live discussion between a platform-governance and a domain-team practitioner recreates the real tensions of adopting dbt, covering accessibility, migration, lineage, and testing.

What you'll take away

  1. 01

    dbt adoption at Delivery Hero was pushed up from customer teams, not down from platform leadership: teams built their own tooling (dbtflow) to bridge dbt manifests into Airflow before the platform team acted.

  2. 02

    At massive scale, about 300,000 tables, 60 petabytes, and 250 dbt projects across 45 decentralized teams, requiring an owner tag on every model, enforced in CI, fixed the "who do I contact when this breaks" problem.

  3. 03

    The team's guiding lesson: embrace tooling change deliberately ("evolving with intent") rather than resisting it or chasing every new stack, and treat a platform's golden path as a living standard, not a fixed one.

Return to all sessions
02

Session speaker

01 speaker

  • M. Waqas Shahid

    Delivery Hero