Datangle

Why this exists

Setting up data infrastructure involves more than connecting a few services. Someone has to translate a business goal into decisions about what to build, what already exists and how the pieces should fit together.

Datangle is where I am exploring that experience. The onboarding journey is a concrete part of the broader product: helping a customer describe their business, review a proposed setup and work through connecting or provisioning the resources it needs.

What I’m building

The infrastructure agent sits inside Datangle. It brings discovery, planning and execution into a connected journey, with a stored onboarding session so the work has an explicit state.

For example, a customer can describe what they want to achieve before reviewing the proposed resources. The plan becomes something they can examine and revise before execution.

Key decisions

• Begin with the business goal. Infrastructure choices need context; a list of connectors alone does not provide it.
• Make the plan explicit. Keep planning and execution as distinct steps so a proposed setup can be reviewed.
• Build inside the existing product. The agent needs to work with the platform’s integrations and account boundaries.

How it works

The onboarding implementation separates session state, plan derivation, plan revision and step execution. That gives each part a specific responsibility and makes the journey more inspectable than a single open-ended conversation.

My accompanying article follows the process from an initial idea through documentation, design and code, including the points where those representations disagreed.

Evidence and learning

There is an implementation in the Datangle codebase, including onboarding sessions, planning and step execution. That is evidence of a build, not evidence of customer adoption or a measured reduction in setup time.

The main lesson so far is that faster implementation does not remove the need to read the proposal carefully, test the experience and revisit the original goal.