By: Peter Sirota
In the 9 months since I joined Mapbox, I’ve said the word “awesome” many times. There’s so much work we’re doing to give customers excellent critical services around location.
Margaret Lee, our new GM of Data Services, is simply awesome. I wish that every single one of our customers and the whole world could sit in a room with Margaret for 15 minutes. Her energy is infectious. Her curiosity makes you sit up and engage deeply with her questions and thinking. She’s is a visionary leader that will make Mapbox data great — not just for our internal teams providing critical services, but for our customers all over the world building with location information.
Margaret controls the data asset of the company — and the tech required to scale that asset. Mapbox is not just building a platform we’re building an asset. As we leverage sensors and cameras our streams of data diversify, and the derivatives we produce while respecting customers privacy and users dignity will be complex and increasingly valuable.
Margaret’s guidance through this next stage will be essential. Margaret sat down to share some of her thoughts about where this industry is going. Read it, I know you’ll be as excited about her impact on Mapbox as we are.
On Four Roles for Data:
“You know, I’m a data person, I love data. Spending 13 years at Oracle and 3.5 years at Splunk sort of gets you to do that and I firmly believe four different things about Data and Mapbox.
First, data is the lifeblood of a business of any business. Whether it’s customer or transaction data or the data out of US security systems, monitoring systems. It’s the lifeblood.
Second data has the opportunity to be a moat for the company. In essence, data assets can differentiate the company’s products and services.
For Mapbox in particular, data is foundational. Whether it’s maps or navigational search, there is the processing layer that can be done very well, very beautifully, and very customizable but ultimately the foundation — the quality, quantity, and variety of the data it’s built on — will be critical to any company that uses it.
Data is lifeblood, data is the moat, data is foundational, and because of that in the end, data is high business value.”
On the possibilities of data:
“When you have enough raw data to help you generate synthetic data — that is the next frontier. Some of the data you cannot generate synthetically. You cannot synthetically generate streets and buildings — Earth is Earth no matter what. But there are other things like traffic patterns and driving behaviors you can start to synthetically generate for different people and use cases.”
“With anonymized data, we have the opportunity to think about combinations of data that we haven’t thought about before. With our unique ability to collect data and process it, we can connect unexpected dots for location use cases. We can make recommendations and insightful observations to our customers. “
On early priorities:
“I’m very excited about this opportunity from a data services perspective because it’s foundational. I absolutely see that the first three priorities I have here are to make sure that internal customers are very, very well taken care of because that’s job number one. The second is to get much better at hardening the foundational layer by being smart about the quality of data and about both the functional and non-functional requirements that we place on our data. The third is to start being creative of combinations of data to find unexpected valuable customer use cases that it supports.”
And finally, I asked her what Mapbox would look like in 5 years if she’s successful in her role. She told me:
“If we succeed we can build data as a product, or data as an offering into a significant pillar for the business.”
Welcome to the team Margaret! We’re excited to move to the next frontier with you.
“Data is lifeblood”: Announcing Margaret Lee, GM Data Services was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.