Product Management interview question [Product Design]:Design a search engine for enterprises.

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Clarifying scope -

• Is it a search engine for general web search queries or an internal tool to find all the documents, slack channels, excel files, etc?****
• Is it a native product or runs on a web browser?
• What web browser does it run at — Chrome, Brave, Safari, Firefox?
• Is it more of a chrome extension?

Goals -

To create a search engine for an enterprise to search for relevant docs, excel files, confluence pages, jira tickets, slack channels and conversations, meeting details, Repositories etc. This search engine is a native software rather than a website to be accessed on a browser.

User Journey -

The user installs this application and allows the permission to integrate this search engine to their Google, Microsoft, Slack, Github and Confluence, Notion, Figma, Zeplin account. They click on the quick search buttons (eg — Shift + Space) to run a quick search type whatever they want to and all the relevant results will appear in front of them, which they can use further.

Pain Points -

1. Searching important documents when required (documents, excels, text files, forms etc)
2. Searching for links to internal websites — HR Portal, Leave portal, Pending expenses, Insurance etc.
3. Looking for emails and meeting links when you are already late to join a call.
4. Searching for important slack channels and conversations before a client call
5. Looking for a Pull Request a day before deployment.
6. Searching for a specific Jira Ticket and related confluence docs (Dev docs, PRD etc)
7. Finding relevant design files on Figma, Zeplin, etc.
8. Bookmarking the links to all of these things mentioned above and going through hundreds of bookmarks when we need that one document at the time of need and still failing to do so.
9. Not having a central repository to search for all work related stuff mentioned above. Eg — Searching on Confluence cloud for a document even if the document was created on Google docs and vice versa and still failing to do so.
10. Security concern of connecting various work accounts to a third-party product.

Solutions -

1. Give users a native product to make a search query rather than opening a browser and visiting a website to make a simple search query.
2. Let users connect all of their work accounts namely — Google, Slack, Confluence Cloud, Github, Figma, Zeplin etc.
3. Let users integrate the product via OAuth authentication and 2FA, and not sharing any passwords.
4. Native product uses a quick access key (Shift + Space) similarly like the ‘Windows’ key on Windows OS, and ‘Cmd’ + ‘Space’ on MacOS for easy access.
5. Advanced search query to make searches on specific platforms (Eg- Onboarding Doc in:Confluence datefrom:28/11/2021 dateto:02/01/2022)
6. Pull meeting links from the calendar according to advanced queries for meetings and let it search easily.
7. Searching for PRs on Github on the basis of their PR number, commit message, date etc directly on the product.
8. Pulling bookmarks from browsers and making them searchable, which currently doesn’t happen.
9. Serve as a central repository for all the docs, links, sheets, excels, figma files, confluence docs, Jira tickets, meeting links, drive files etc.
10. Save favorite visits as shortcuts on the product to open these at a click of a button.

Success metrics -

1. Average time required for a search
2. Average number of search sessions per user
3. Percentage of revisits
4. Results per search query
5. Number of queries per day per user
6. Number of relevant answers served for queries per day per user