Search Infrastructure Migration
A structured consulting engagement to help a global music streaming platform evaluate whether to migrate from its current SaaS search provider to a self managed infrastructure on AWS, with a focus on scalability, search quality, and long term cost reduction.
The challenge.
The client was running their search on a third party SaaS provider that had served them well early on, but was no longer a viable long term fit. A hard technical ceiling was approaching, operational autonomy over search relevance was limited, and costs were scaling poorly relative to catalogue growth.
The question was not just whether to migrate, but to what, at what cost, and in what sequence.
My role was to lead the engagement end to end: structure the discovery process, facilitate the client workshops, frame the vendor evaluation, and produce a recommendation the client could take to leadership.
Process.
Deliverables.
How I approached it.
The core challenge was making a technically complex decision legible to a leadership audience. The MoSCoW framework was the key tool: it meant the recommendation was grounded in requirements the client had validated themselves, not in our preferences as consultants.
I also treated the AWS cloud programme coordination as a product output, not an administrative task. Aligning the technical recommendation with available migration funding meant the client had a financially defensible path, not just a technically correct one. That kind of alignment between what is right and what is viable is where product thinking adds the most value in a consulting context.
The full assessment phase was funded through an AWS cloud programme, at zero cost to the client. The recommended migration path was structured to qualify for additional migration credits, giving the final recommendation both technical and commercial grounding.
