You are on the board of Google Maps. There are number of competitors coming up in the market. i.e Waze etc. What is your strategy to maintain your dominance?

Thats an interesting question to tackle. To come up with strategy one should know the goal, the current status and most importantly one should know about the product and its competition. So of this, I would like to clarify few information related to the Goal, Current product health before starting with anything.

So, How is our users reacting to the new competition? Are we facing higher churn rate? Decrease in engagement? Like always, there are some noise in these metrics. Apart from that there are no disturbances as of now. 

Okay, So the product's health is pretty good and we want to be cautious of the rising competition. Yup.

Okay, So, Is it safe to assume our goal here is to increase ours User's Engagement? You're the PM. So its your take.

Okay, then I strongly believe that Focussing on Engagement is the best option as currently the more we keep the users engaged the lesser will they think about trying out new options as the users never want to  put in extra work to get anything. Moreover, Focussing on Engagement will help us increase our User Retention more and thus will improve our Health of the product substantioally.

Okay Seems reasonable. What's Next.

So, with the above information, I would like to jump into sharing my understanding of the product before coming up with any Strategy.

Google Maps is a product offered by Google that aims at collecting information around the Globe and organize it in the most effective manners for its users. Maps like any other product fits in this Goal seamlessly. The Product helps its users reach a point B from Point A easily in the shortest routes. One can also explore his/her surrounding using the product. It is a Free product that comes along with the Google Suite. It uses the information of users search, and present location status to collect data and use this data for further development of its Products. The major Competition to this is Apple Maps, Waze, etc.. One major strength of this product is that it is a add on to any Android device by Default and thus has millions of users.

If the above understanding makes sense, I would like to move ahead. Sure Go Ahead.

So, with the above understanding, it is pretty obvious that any person who wants to know more about his surrounding can use Maps as his Go-to options. Thus, This gives us an idea of the major types of users:

1. Travellers who wants to explore the new place that they are into.
2. Locals who wants to know plan his journey when he/she is to enter a new region of their city.
3. Business Owners marking their shops in the G-Maps using this as a source of awareness for their shop to the locals.

1. With Gazillion amount of Data that Google has on the searches done by tourists in the map and other user ratings can come up with a suitable itenary for the travellers. 
   1. This is one of the strong domain of Google- Collecting information that users can search for. 
   2. With this feature in place, a tourist person can search with generic phrases like "Things to do at New York for 3 days" or other simple phrases and Google can list its results with different itenaries.
   3. It would be great to have some filters associated with this like, Price, Season's influence, i.e, Few things are suitable only for summer. So one can filter out depending on the current situation
   4. This will also be one difficult thing to replicate in the near future and be as efficient as Google
2. We can help users travel through Indoors,i.e at places like Pubs, Huge Malls.
   1. This'll help the reach different places within a building easily even with crowd. 
   2. This'll be mainly used by people in groups, i.e, a son who missed his way through the crowd can use this to go to their parents provided their parents share their location.
   3. One important thing to be careful about here is that the accuracy of pinpointing the location has to be of great precision.
   4. One major drawback here is that this can be replicated by the competitions as this doesn't solely depend on the Unique strengths of Google
3. G-Maps can be integrated with G-Calender and Maps cancome up with an itenary of how the person should plan his next day using his  schedule at different places and can share this schedule as Push-Notification to the users.
   1. This can also remind users on things that one can do while stuck in traffic or somewhere.
   2. One  best thing about this is that it is once again more difficult to replicate as this depends on integration with one another product of Google itself
4. Google Maps can stay more and more updated only if the users contribute to the ecosystem by sharing reviews, adding new shops/locations in the locality. Thus, to encourage more & more users to engage  with the app and make it updated, we canprovide them with benefits like cashback though GPay.
   1. This will make them more and more engaged with the app
   2. Alos will help increase user acquisition to GPay.
   3. One important thing is to strateise the deal more efficiently that it is not a loss for either of the parties involved.