Thoughts about Managing Search Teams
Source: https://queryunderstanding.com/thoughts-about-managing-search-teams-7b3e9f1c4d2a Author: Daniel Tunkelang
Summary
Practical advice for leading search engineering teams. Tunkelang distills his experience into four core recommendations for search team management.
Recommendation 1: Combine Product and Engineering
Search is a product discipline, not just an engineering one. Teams that separate “search product” from “search engineering” create friction:
- PMs without technical depth make poor trade-off decisions
- Engineers without product intuition build the wrong things
- Best teams have hybrid roles or extremely tight collaboration
Recommendation 2: Be Data-Driven
Search quality is measurable. Teams that operate without measurement are flying blind:
- Define metrics before building features
- Run A/B tests for every significant change
- Build offline evaluation infrastructure early — it pays for itself
- Don’t rely solely on anecdotes (“users told us search is bad”)
Recommendation 3: Incremental Execution
Avoid big-bang rewrites. Search systems are complex enough that:
- Large changes have unpredictable interactions
- Incremental improvements compound over time
- Smaller experiments are easier to measure and roll back
- “Ship, measure, iterate” beats “design, build, launch”
Recommendation 4: Holistic Approach
Search quality is end-to-end, not just the ranking model:
- Indexing quality matters (what’s indexed, freshness)
- Query understanding matters (how queries are parsed)
- UI/UX matters (how results are presented)
- Feedback loops matter (how signals are collected)
- Teams that optimize one component in isolation miss cross-component leverage
Search PM Skills
A good search PM needs to understand:
- How indexing and query parsing work
- What the ranking features are and their trade-offs
- How to design and interpret A/B tests
- How to prioritize across relevance, latency, and UX
Key Concepts
- Combined product-engineering — avoid org silos in search teams
- Data-driven search — measurement and A/B testing as core practice
- Incremental execution — prefer small experiments over big rewrites
- Holistic search quality — end-to-end thinking across indexing, ranking, UX
Related Concepts
Related Articles
- Search Product Management - The Most Misunderstood Role
- Affordances for Conversational Search
- Setting Up a Relevance Evaluation Program