By: Eric Gundersen
Andrew Chen brings an amazing mix of engineering depth and product vision and is someone I want around the table to help us build out the next phase of our product roadmap. As the Mapbox product expands into new industries, the backbone of our product — the map — continues to become ever more valuable. Both our maps and search will now be lead by Andrew Chen, our new Head of Product for Search and Maps.
Andrew joins Mapbox from Google Maps, where he spent the last five+ years as the Lead Product Manager for Local Search. In that role, Andrew’s team grew Google’s local search user base to over 1 billion users and launched offerings like “Popular Times,” which used anonymized telemetry data to determine hot spots in local neighborhoods and the best times to visit them.
“Having come from the Google Maps team, we know this opportunity is massive but it’s bigger than one company,” Andrew said. “It’s bigger than Google, bigger than Apple — it’s going to be at the core of every major mobile application. Mapbox is at the forefront of this change where maps are the new medium through which our digital and real-worlds begin to merge.”
At Mapbox, Andrew will manage our development priorities and roadmap aligned to market opportunities, customer needs, and our goal to be inside every app powering location across mobile devices, auto, and IoT.
“One difference versus Google is that Mapbox is building out a true platform for any developer to take their creativity and their wildest dreams and make it reality,” Andrew said.
“Google Maps desires more control and they’re in the space where it feels like a Google product at the end of the day. In their APIs, they don’t allow the level of creativity and control that developers really need. Mapbox is speaking to the need to break out of some of these restrictive parameters from other providers… Developers want a lot more control and customization on a platform that’s built for them.”
Finally, Andrew’s vision is in line with our core Mapbox values of transparency and trust when it comes to customers’ and consumers’ privacy. “It’s important to be really sensitive to user privacy and making sure that we’re really respectful, especially in the environment we’re in.”
Andrew’s experience fuses two key components of our building blocks, allowing us to build a unified customer experience and deliver our service holistically. Andrew, along with the Maps and Search product team — Karen E., Camilla, and Lily — and the Maps engineering division — while partnering with Emily C on the engineering side.
Prior to Google, Andrew was Director of Product at Simply Hired, where his background in job search platforms led to a successful run during a period of high growth for the company. Andrew has ten years of product and engineering experience with an MBA from Kellogg and a computer science degree from MIT.
Lead Google PM of Local Search, Andrew Chen, Joins Mapbox as Head of Product for Maps and Search was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.