Search manager

Spark Trajectory Intranet and Digital Workplace Roles and Teams > This role

What does the role Search manager do?

The Search Manager is responsible for the configuration, performance, and ongoing optimisation of enterprise search across the intranet and digital workplace. The role works at the intersection of information architecture, content governance, and platform administration such as: tuning relevance, managing query analytics, and working with content owners to improve findability. As AI-assisted search and retrieval become standard, the Search Manager's remit increasingly extends to the quality of results surfaced by AI copilots and retrieval-augmented generation systems.

Also known as

  • Enterprise search manager
  • Intranet search manager
  • Search and findability manager
  • Knowledge findability manager
  • Search experience manager
  • Search and navigation specialist
  • Findability lead
  • Search optimisation manager
Occasional prevalence

This role is sometimes found in larger organisations

Primary responsibilties

  • Configures and maintains enterprise search platforms across the intranet and digital workplace
  • Monitors search analytics to identify failed queries, low-relevance results, and findability gaps
  • Tunes relevance models, promoted results, and query rules to improve search performance
  • Works with content owners and information architects to address underlying content and metadata issues
  • Manages the scope and indexing configuration of AI retrieval tools and copilot systems
  • Reports on search performance and recommends improvements to stakeholders

Related teams

We've known this role to be part of the following teams:
Digital Workplace Team
Intranet Team
Knowledge Management Team

Skills profile

Note: This is what we documented as an exemplar. It's unlikely to always be the case and relates to a role's involvement with the delivery of digital employee experience and perhaps not everything they do. You can open this in the Skills Profile Builder if you want to customise it.

Apprentice

Limited but increasing capabilities based on learning and on-the-job experience, but guidance and mentoring is required to fulfil potential.

Practitioner

Good professional capabilities sufficient for many circumstances and roles. Able to guide and mentor apprentices.

Master

Abilities that are the best in the professional field, gained from significant experience. Able to teach and guide others in their development.
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Outline job description

The Search Manager owns enterprise search across the intranet and digital workplace: making sure employees can actually find what they're looking for, and increasingly, that AI retrieval tools surface the right answers. It's a role that sits at the intersection of platform administration, content governance, and information architecture, and requires someone who's equally comfortable with data and with people.

About the role

You'll own search end-to-end: the platform configuration, the analytics, the ongoing tuning, and the cross-team work needed to fix the underlying content and metadata issues that cause most search problems. As AI-assisted search becomes standard, the role's remit extends naturally into configuring and governing AI retrieval tools and copilot systems.

The role appears across several team contexts. In an Intranet Team it focuses on intranet search. In a Digital Workplace Team the scope typically extends across the full platform stack. In a Knowledge Management Team (most commonly in professional services or legal environments) the focus is on the retrievability of the knowledge corpus specifically.

What you'll actually be doing

A lot of the job is detective work: using query analytics to understand where search is failing, diagnosing whether the root cause is platform configuration, content quality, or metadata, and then working across teams to fix it. You'll tune relevance models, manage promoted results, and configure indexing scope for AI tools, but you'll also spend time working with content owners and information architects to address the underlying issues that no amount of platform tuning can compensate for.

Stakeholder communication is a real part of the role: you'll be reporting on search performance, making recommendations, and building the case for improvements that often require buy-in from teams you don't manage.

What we're looking for

Hands-on experience configuring enterprise search platforms (Microsoft Search, Coveo, Sinequa, or equivalent) is essential. You should be confident working with query analytics and using data to diagnose problems. A solid grounding in information architecture, taxonomy, and metadata is expected, along with a growing understanding of how AI retrieval systems work.

The ability to work across organisational boundaries matters as much as the technical skills — most search problems require you to influence teams you don't control.

Typical background

Most people in this role come from information management, library science, or digital workplace administration. Direct enterprise search platform experience is typically required. A background in data analytics or information retrieval is an advantage.

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Errors? Disagreements? Omissions?

We have hopefully created these exemplars with thought and care. It is not the only way of looking at these roles and teams in the world, and relates specifically to the intranet and digital workplance profession. It therefore concentrates on some things and ignores others.

If you find an error, disagree wholeheartly or feel there is a glaring ommission we'd love to know.

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License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Creative Commons License

Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.