Amidst Tech Layoffs, Google Consolidates Waze and Maps Teams

The fourth quarter of 2022 has been rife with reports of companies laying off swathes of employees. With many companies engaging in cost-cutting measures, performance improvement plans, and trimming the fat, Google has found a novel way to conserve resources without laying off employees. 

After CEO Sundar Pichai’s all-hands meeting in September of this year, the company has seen widespread restructuring and talks of layoffs. After pressure mounted from investors to cut costs at the tech giant, Pichai expressed his desire to lay off roughly 10% of the company’s workforce. The company has already begun performance improvement plans for its employees and will reportedly fire its lowest performers.

Apart from layoffs, Google is looking at internal restructuring and canning its so-called “Moonshots” to save money. The move to merge Waze and Google Maps is part of this strategy. 

Waze was acquired by Google for $1.3 billion in 2013. Until now, the team maintaining the app has been a discrete unit, but that is set to change. The restructuring will consolidate overlapping mapmaking tasks across Waze and Maps, cutting down the total amount of resources required to manage both products. 

Post-merging, both teams will operate under Google Geo, the team in charge of Google Street View, Maps, and Google Earth. Christopher Phillips, who currently leads the Geo team, will now head both Waze and Geo. 

Speaking on this move, a Google spokesperson said, “Google remains deeply committed to Waze’s unique brand, its beloved app, and its thriving community of volunteers and users.”

The company’s history at Google had largely been a smooth journey until Noam Bardin, the CEO at the time of the merger, left in 2021. In a blog post, he detailed some of the challenges he faced after Waze merged with the tech giant. He said, “Looking back, we could have probably grown faster and much more efficiently had we stayed independent.”

The app currently has over 151 million active users, and contributes a bulk of the traffic data used to provide prediction on Google Maps. It set the standard for user-generated alerts, such as road blockages and ongoing constructions, which has since been integrated into Google Maps. 

While Google has stated that it will not layoff any talent in these two teams, the company is still under immense pressure to cut costs. This move might be the harbinger of more restructurings and layoffs to come in the future.