Waze Connected Citizens Program

Di-Ann Eisnor, Director of Growth at Waze, founded the company’s Connected Citizens Program (CCP), a data-sharing partnership that provided officials with traffic incident and congestion data. Since 2015, her program had enabled officials in Kentucky and elsewhere to share more reliable traffic information more quickly with drivers. Now, the program that Eisnor and CCP’s three-person team had built was short the analytical tools Kentucky officials felt they needed to prepare for the Kentucky Derby, their biggest event of the year. What would she do about that? Eisnor had a challenge on her hands in Kentucky. And also in Jakarta. And Los Angeles. From its launch in October 2014 through spring 2016, one-on-one contact by her small CCP team had spurred growth from 10 to more than 50 partners. Eisnor and Paige Fitzgerald, CCP’s Program Manager, earned kudos from their Waze colleagues and caught the attention of Waze’s now-parent company, Google. But the successes came with high expectations, too. Waze was intensely focused on user growth, and Google’s culture was to build things and then build those things “10x” bigger. How would Eisnor’s team take a free program supported by three people to 500 partners or more?