Search Relevance Product Manager (eCommerce)

Career Area:

Technology, Digital and Data

Job Description:

Your Work Shapes the World at Caterpillar Inc.

When you join Caterpillar, you're joining a global team who cares not just about the work we do – but also about each other.  We are the makers, problem solvers, and future world builders who are creating stronger, more sustainable communities. We don't just talk about progress and innovation here – we make it happen, with our customers, where we work and live. Together, we are building a better world, so we can all enjoy living in it.

Role Summary: 
If you enjoy tackling complex, data-driven problems and want to help shape a best-in-class digital shopping experience, this is the opportunity for you. 

Caterpillar is looking for an experienced Search Relevance Product Manager to own how search understands intent and ranks results, ensuring customers see the right products, in the right order, fast. This role sits at the core of the search experience and directly impacts customer satisfaction, findability, and conversion. 

You will be responsible for defining how search “thinks”, from query understanding (e.g., synonyms, typos, category mapping) to ranking strategies and evaluation frameworks. You will partner closely with Engineering and Data Science to continuously improve search quality through experimentation, data analysis, and disciplined release criteria. 

This is a highly cross-functional role requiring strong product judgment, analytical rigor, and customer empathy. You will advocate for customers by deeply understanding their search behavior and ensuring the experience helps them find the right product faster with minimal friction. 

What You Wil Do: 

• Own search relevance strategy, including ranking signals and query understanding 

• Define and evolve ranking policies (availability, price, popularity, fitment, recency) 

• Lead improvements in query handling (synonyms, typo correction, rewriting) 

• Run a zero-results reduction program with effective fallbacks 

• Establish quality gates (offline evaluation + A/B testing) for all releases 

• Design and evaluate experiments to drive measurable improvements 

• Build and maintain a gold standard evaluation dataset (“truth set”) 

• Prioritize and deliver a relevance roadmap across key query types 

• Work closely with Engineering and Data Science to define features, signals, and evaluation criteria 

What You Will Have:

Business Analysis: Knowledge of business analysis and the set of tasks, techniques and tools required to identify business needs; ability to recommend solutions that deliver value to stakeholders.
Decision Making and Critical Thinking: Knowledge of the decision-making process and associated tools and techniques; ability to accurately analyze situations and reach productive decisions based on informed judgment.
Software Change Request Management: Knowledge of software change request management; ability to manage software product change requests from customers, prospective customers, vendors, and internal staff.
Software Engineering: Knowledge of software engineering; ability to deliver new or enhanced fee-based software products.
Software Product Business Knowledge: Knowledge of and experience with the business aspects and operation of a software product; ability to manage install base, current uses, future plans, and product vision.
User Acceptance Testing (UAT): Knowledge of UAT activities, tasks, tools and techniques; ability to design, implement and evaluate acceptance tests for end-users.
 

Consideration for top candidates:  

• Experience with search platforms (e.g., Elasticsearch, Solr, vector or hybrid search)  

• Experience with LLM-powered search or query understanding, including semantic search, embeddings, or retrieval augmented generation 

• Experience with eCommerce search behavior (e.g., part number, fitment, attribute-driven queries)  

• Digital product management, user experience, user research, digital strategy, or related function  

• Experience managing projects using Product Management and/or Agile software tools such as Aha, Product Board, Azure DevOps 

• Human-centered design, lean innovation, or design thinking methodologies   

• Product Owner certification (Certified Scrum Product Owner from Scrum Alliance) 

• Knowledge of Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) and demonstrated experience employing SDLC in aspects of the