"The first thing I like to do in situations like these is to fully understand the technology that is being discussed and what its capabilities are. It would be important to explore what an initial implementation would look like and what options we would have for growth in the future. I would ask the technical lead to walk me through all of the benefits and any of the cons that are worth considering. I would research the claims to ensure they are supported through reliable data based on similar implementations.
From there, I would do research on my own to help me assess customer impact. I would search for data on products that contain similar functionality and how users responded to those features. I would also reach out to current customers to walk them through the proposed changes and get a sense of how they would be affected.
Assuming that the benefits of implementing the technology are high and the impact on the customer is low, I would then want to consult with a designer to determine how we could implement the new features in a way that is intuitive and pleasing to our customers. I would also work to understand how much of a time savings the easier to develop features are. If the savings were significant, I would work to identify other valuable features that could potentially be added to offset the impact of the search changes on the customer.
If it turned out that the new search functions would affect the customers in a significantly negative way, I would offer the data necessary to support this claim. For example, I would show the percent reduction in critical data they are able to access, the increase in search time, or the increase in click metrics. I would also identify the most critical search use cases and work with the technical lead to research other options that would offer similar benefits without sacrificing quality."
