Strategy question

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?

Practice this question out loud. An AI interviewer asks it, follows up like a real interviewer would, and scores your answer. Type or speak.

What this question tests

Whether you can defend a market leader's position against a niche competitor using real product and data advantages.

Clarify the competitive threat: Waze's niche is real-time crowdsourced traffic and community, not full mapping breadth.
Assess Google Maps' advantages: broader use cases like transit and business listings, Android distribution, and larger data scale.
Identify where Waze actually wins today, hyperlocal incident reporting and a more engaged community, and treat that as the real gap.
Propose closing the gap by strengthening real-time community features inside Maps, not just leaning on scale.
Consider integration, since Google owns both products, for example feeding Waze's crowdsourced data into Maps.
Define a dominance metric, navigation market share and daily active navigators, rather than just app downloads.

Correctly frames Waze's threat as narrow, community-driven live traffic, instead of treating it as an equal-scale rival.
Leverages Google's real assets, Android default placement, Street View, and business data, as durable moats.
Proposes a specific counter, improving live hazard reporting inside Maps, instead of a vague call to innovate more.
Notes both products are Google-owned, lowering cannibalization risk and opening a data-sharing option.

Treating Waze as an equal-scale competitor instead of diagnosing its specific, narrower edge.
Proposing broad improve everything strategies instead of a targeted response to the actual gap.

Would you eventually merge Waze's features into Maps or keep the apps separate, and why?
How would you measure whether Maps had closed the community gap?