Growing Your Search Team
Mikio L. Braun

Mikio L. Braun, MICES 2022, June 15, 2022

Search Systems Are Complex• Intake• Enrichment• Search Engine• Ranking• Query Understanding• Auto-Suggest• Synonyms, Spell Checking, …
Dr. Mikio BraunMICES 2022, June 15th, 2022

Why Grow A Team• Be faster?
• Have a more robust platform?
• Work on more things in parallel?
• Because you can?
… but how?

Dr. Mikio BraunMICES 2022, June 15th, 2022

How Not To Do It• Query Understanding Team• Spell Checking Team• Search Engine Team• Intake TeamAnything you do becomes amulti-team project 🚩 🚩 🚩• …

Dr. Mikio BraunMICES 2022, June 15th, 2022

Team Topologies: Optimizing Teams For “Flow”• Most of the work in a team should be possible
independently.

• “Stream-aligned team”• More than feature teams

https://teamtopologies.com
Dr. Mikio BraunMICES 2022, June 15th, 2022

Decoupling Teams

Dr. Mikio BraunMICES 2022, June 15th, 2022

Cognitive Load and Communication Patterns• Cognitive Load 😵💫
• Technologies 💻⚙• Number of people (🍕🍕 rule)• Communication Patterns

Dr. Mikio BraunMICES 2022, June 15th, 2022

Team Topologies and Interaction Patterns

Dr. Mikio BraunMICES 2022, June 15th, 2022

The Four Team Types
Stream-aligned Team• Steady ow of feature delivery• No hands-o to other teams• Quickly react to feedback

Enabling Team• “Internal consultants”• Help teams with technology/topics they needto learn• Tracks state-of-the-art in their area ofexpertise before other teams need it

Platform Team

Complicated Subsystem Team• Creates self-service products other teams can• “Internal agency”• Reduce cognitive load for stream-aligneduse• Focus on reliability and usability• Proactively looks out for the needs of other teams

teams.

• Correctly prioritizes and delivers upcoming
work based on the needs of other teams

ffflDr. Mikio BraunMICES 2022, June 15th, 2022

Fracture Planes• Business Domain Bounded Context• Regulatory Compliance• Change Cadence• Team Location• Risk• Performance Isolation• Technology• User Personas
Dr. Mikio BraunMICES 2022, June 15th, 2022

Team Topologies for Search• No one size ts all.
• It really depends on your “stream of work.”
What are the things you want tofocus on in the next 12 months?

fi

Dr. Mikio BraunMICES 2022, June 15th, 2022

Typical Topics That Can Become A Stream of Work• Full text searchChecklist• Auto suggest• Can you technically put everything in one• Ranking• Can you measure impact independently?

• Faceting/Filtering(e.g. ranking:• Item selection- sorting/ranking deeply intertwined withsearch engine• Size- Impact may be measured, but other activities• Availability(e.g. ltering:• …

- needs to work with front end as well as intake)Dr. Mikio Braun
fiteam?

might distort impact)

MICES 2022, June 15th, 2022

Support Structures• Candidates for Platform/Complex Subsystem:• Frontend• Search Engine

Or alternatively, have teams
manage/learn that themselves!

• IntakeAlso: building platforms is hard!

• Candidates for Enabling:• Data Science, search relevance optimization
Dr. Mikio BraunMICES 2022, June 15th, 2022

Search Engine Platform• Self-service search engine (incl. deployment, scaling, intake, …)• Make everything con gurable (intake, elds, analyzers, sorting, …)• Platform team is there to make it robust, improve usability, keep people fromshooting themselves in the foot.

• Much more than “Elastic-as-a-Service”

fiMICES 2022, June 15th, 2022
fiDr. Mikio BraunReplacing the Search Engine with Microservices• Solr/Elastic is so complicated, let’s pull query processing/ranking/spell
checking out.

• You gain more exibility deploying parts independently.
• You’ll need to literally reinvent the wheel for the preprocessing.
• Esp. in query processing, mistakes are hard to x later.

MICES 2022, June 15th, 2022
fiflDr. Mikio Braun

How to Change• Change interaction patterns before making technical changes• Close collaboration => lesser collaboration => X-as-a-service• Never ending process• Look out for triggers:• Software has grown too large for one team• Speed is becoming slower• Multiple business services rely on a large set of underlying services
Dr. Mikio BraunMICES 2022, June 15th, 2022

Summary• Search is particularly complex to scale because thetechnology is complex and intertwined.

• Team topologies is a great framework fordecoupling teams and have clear focus for teams.

• Identify main streams of work.
• Think of proper supporting teams (platform,enabling, complicated subsystem).

• Never ending process.
Dr. Mikio BraunMICES 2022, June 15th, 2022