Google Maps · Global Product Marketing and Brand Manager
From zero to a community of three million
The problem
In 2011, millions of people used Google Maps to get places. Fewer used it to decide where to go. A map without good reviews can't tell you where to eat, and Maps didn't have enough of them yet.
Reviews have a cold start problem. Nobody writes one where nobody will read it, and nobody reads them where there are none yet. In every new city, someone had to write the first few hundred.
You can't pay people to write them. You can't trust a review somebody was paid for, and neither can anyone else. The program built to solve this kept changing names. It was Hotpot when I joined, then Google Places, then Google+ Local, then City Experts. What it didn't have was a community, or a name a contributor would be proud of.
So the job was to find the people in each city who already wanted to write about the places they loved, and give them a reason to keep going.
What I did
I was part of a small team under the program's lead, and I held four jobs in it over almost four years.
New York first. I ran local marketing for Google Places and, once Google bought it, for Zagat. Events, and the first contributors in the city.
Then the US. I recruited, trained and ran 12 direct reports across six cities, and set the practices they worked from.
Then the world, as global chief of staff. We grew from 14 launch cities to 40 contractors across 28 cities in 11 countries, and hired 18 of them full time. At the peak we had at least 30 events running at once. I managed a $12M budget within 2%, inside a program that ran past $100M.
Then the brand, as global product marketing and brand manager. I wrote the brand book and the editorial guidelines, ran the weekly creative review, and led the rebrand of the top-reviewer program, City Experts, into what became Local Guides.
The thing we got wrong, then right. We assumed people wrote reviews for perks and status. Our research said otherwise. They wrote to help the places they loved get found, and to help the people they loved find somewhere great. We built the brand around that, and it held.
What changed
“She is a very smart and creative marketer and can solve very complex problems.”
Eren Kantarli, Google
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