Waze
Creating the most beloved
navigation app in the world
Here’s the thing about start-ups: Just when you think you’ve got everything figured out, the market shifts, and suddenly, you’re back at square one. That’s exactly what happened in the early days at Waze.
As the first hire under the VP of Product & Marketing, I was tasked with building the brand from the ground up alongside a talented designer, Elad XXX. At the time, what set Waze apart in the crowded navigation app market was its real-time traffic reporting, aggregated from user-contributed data. While, today, this may be table stakes, back then, it was a very novel feature.
Until it wasn’t.
A few months into my role, Google and Apple both announced their own real-time traffic integrations, within a week of each other. We panicked. Our primary differentiator had just evaporated, and as a scrappy start-up of about a dozen people, competing with two global tech giants seemed impossible.
To me, this crisis wasn’t a technical challenge; that battle has been lost. Simply put, we were no longer technologically differentiated. Now, it was a battle of messaging and positioning to find and then articulate the white space in the market that we could own. I asked the VP to give me a few weeks to figure out a plan.
The first step? Talk to users. I conducted interviews to understand how they used the app, what they loved, and what frustrated them. What I discovered was surprising: people weren’t really using Waze as a traditional navigation app. Most users opened it during their daily commutes—routes they already knew by heart. It was counter-intuitive, but I came to understand that while they didn’t need directions, they wanted all the benefits of the community reporting features.
This insight sparked a realization: what if we weren’t a navigation app at all? What if we talked about ourselves as an entirely new category? Instead of positioning Waze as a navigation tool, I suggested we call it a commuting app. This framing struck a perfect balance—it was intuitive enough for people to grasp, yet novel enough to spark curiosity.
The message resonated. Before long, we were being described in the press as “the world’s first social navigation app.” It was a niche we could own, and it aligned perfectly with the community-driven brand identity we had already been working to articulate.
That community ethos became the heart of the brand, inspiring the tagline I created: “Outsmarting Traffic, Together.” Traffic was a universal pain point, and our goal was to help people navigate it in a way that was not only smarter but also more fun.
It makes sense that we were always looking to infuse more fun into the app, but want to know a secret? In the office, we talked a lot about love. How we thought we could make people love us, how to show our love for them, and nurture a sense of connection across our user base. To me, this was Waze’s secret sauce: good people, helping each other out, turning a tedious commute into an opportunity to give and receive small acts of kindness. If you ever benefited from hearing ‘Police reported ahead’ because someone 5 minutes in front of you wanted to give people five minutes behind her a heads-up, or if you’ve ever been that person paying it forward yourself, then you know what I’m talking about.
Building the Waze brand from 0 to 1 was a blend of creativity, strategy, and grit. When I joined, we were a tiny team with a bold vision: To transform a utilitarian navigation tool into something people didn’t just use, but genuinely loved. And that was no small feat.
One of my proudest contributions was the Baby Wazer concept. It creating a progression system that anchored users at a starting point and incentivized them to engage with the community. New users were represented as baby avatars on the map, and as they contributed more—reporting road hazards, confirming traffic conditions—they "grew up." Over time, they unlocked new moods, earned status, and climbed the ranks to become "road royalty." It wasn’t just fun; it was sticky. People became emotionally invested in their avatars, and the gamified system kept people opening the app every single day.
Years later, when the Baby Wazer concept was highlighted in a gamification masterclass I was sitting in on as a prime example of innovative product design, I sat in the back of the room and blushed.
Another highlight was the Commute-o-Meter, a feature that proactively gauged traffic conditions along a user's daily route and prompted them with optimal departure times. It was an early attempt to shift Waze from being reactive to predictive. I had to fight hard to keep the silly name—but I felt strongly that it embodied the blend of utility and personality that came to define the Waze brand. Looking back, it was a precursor to the predictive traffic insights that are now standard in navigation apps, but at the time, it was groundbreaking.
As Waze scaled globally, I worked closely with our international PR teams to maintain a consistent brand voice across geographies, while allowing for local nuances. Whether it was managing product launches in new markets or hosting meet-ups with our most dedicated users, I loved connecting the community that made Waze so special.
And then there was the day-to-day work of keeping the brand alive and thriving. I loved writing scripts and managing video production, crafting user-focused communications, and dreaming up creative local and global campaigns to keep our users happy and connected. But what I loved most was being the central hub for the voice of the brand. This role allowed the brand to exist in a fully cohesive universe—where every touchpoint, from user emails to version release videos, and even error messages, felt seamless and consistent. Every piece of communication wasn’t just functional; it was an opportunity to reinforce the brand’s personality and make users feel part of something bigger.
By the time Waze was acquired by Google for $1.1B, we had grown from a tiny start-up to a global movement with over 25 million passionate users in 100+ countries. What started as an idea—a navigation app powered by community—had become a household name.
Even today, whenever I hop into a cab in a far away city like Nairobi or Rio De Janeiro or Cairo and see a little Wazer buzzing along on the driver’s phone, I feel a swell of pride. It’s just a reminder of the power of a strong, user-centered brand and the magic that happens when you build with a sense of play, purpose, and most of all, love.