Search relevance for understaffed teams

Have an existing search stack, need to evolve it, but don’t know the next steps to take?

Today’s cost-constrained environment mirrors when I started working in relevance. When teams needed “quick hits” to make an improvement - not some extensive, deep, strategic investment where they hire a dozen new people. I talk to lots of friends about search relevance on their teams, I hear about more and more understaffed search teams told to “make search better” but with no extra resources 🙃.

In a way, this is a blessing in disguise. It forces you to focus on value NOW, not some distant future after we’ve hired a ton of new people. I think you CAN get there, and make progress now.

Think of this as a wiki page. All the ways I’ve seen teams make progress quickly. I’ll update it as I learn more easy places to get started.

It’s a bit long for a blog article. So I captured in a scrappy public google doc. Enjoy!

Contact me with feedback and questions. It’s an amazing opportunity for me to learn from you what’s worked. Maybe you can share some pointers that have worked well for you that I could add?