Product design question
How would you improve Glean's enterprise search relevance across 100+ connectors?
- Glean
- Product design
- Hard
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What this question tests
Enterprise search relevance design at scale, requiring judgment about ranking signals across fragmented data sources.
How to approach it
- Clarify the challenge: relevance across 100-plus connectors (Slack, Google Drive, Confluence, Jira, and more) means content varies wildly in structure, freshness, and trust level.
- Identify current likely weaknesses: recency bias missing older but still-relevant documents, and permission-aware ranking that may surface technically-accessible but low-relevance content.
- Propose a source-quality signal: weight results by document freshness, author authority (e.g., an official wiki page over a stray chat message), and historical click-through for similar queries.
- Propose a personalization layer: rank results higher if they come from the querying user's own team, frequently used tools, or recent work context.
- Add explicit feedback loops: let users mark a result as helpful or not, feeding back into ranking, since enterprise search lacks the scale of consumer search click data.
- Define success metrics: click-through rate on top-3 results, and a qualitative satisfaction score gathered via periodic surveys given limited natural feedback signal in enterprise settings.
What a strong answer includes
- Names the specific challenge of enterprise search: fragmented, heterogeneous sources with far less natural feedback signal than web search.
- Proposes concrete ranking signals (freshness, source authority, personalization) tied to enterprise data realities.
- Addresses the cold-start-like problem of sparse click data with an explicit feedback mechanism.
- Balances personalization against permission constraints, since relevance ranking must respect access control.
- Uses both quantitative (click-through) and qualitative (survey) metrics given enterprise search's smaller data volume.
Common mistakes
- Proposing a generic web-search-style ranking algorithm without addressing enterprise-specific data fragmentation.
- Ignoring permission constraints when discussing ranking and personalization.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you handle a source with poor or missing metadata?
- How would permissions interact with your ranking signals?
- How would you gather enough feedback signal in a lower-traffic enterprise setting?
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More questions from Glean
Learn the skill behind it
Chapters of the AI PM course that teach what this question tests.
- Chapter 4: Discovery and strategy for AI products
- Chapter 7: AI UX and human oversight: design for a system that is wrong sometimes
- Chapter 14: Get the job: the AI PM interview loop