Albi Wiedersberg was just named VP of Product Management at the Overture Maps Foundation, where he’ll extend his existing work on meeting user, partner, and member needs. The creation of the VP of product role continues Overture’s focus on filling out executive ranks in its third year of operation as it looks to scale rapidly in terms of members, partners, data providers, and more. We spoke to Albi about where he sees Overture’s product focus in the coming year.
Q: Product Management is a new role at Overture. Why is it important at this stage of Overture’s evolution?
A: This reflects Overture’s transition from an early-stage open data project to a more mature organization. Establishing a dedicated product management function is critical and underscores our commitment to a strategic product direction and an ambitious, user-centric roadmap. It’s about defining clear requirements, setting strategic priorities, and aligning our roadmap with the needs of our members and the ecosystem. This structure will ensure every initiative will directly serve our users, partners, and member organizations, accelerating our growth and impact in open mapping.
Q: How will this role build on your previous role focused on product and partnerships?
A: I’ll still be talking to all of the stakeholders that I was working with before! This new role is more structured and more focused, which is required given Overture’s growth and where we are headed, especially now that our themes are under general availability. On the technical, engineering, and partnership fronts, our goal is to articulate a clear product vision and roadmap that brings everything together to better serve our users’ needs and expands the global impact of open map data. We want to build what truly matters to our users – supporting the growth of geospatial use cases and robust mapping applications. And we want to define our long- and short-term priorities based on user needs, ensuring alignment across the organization and driving our shared vision forward.
Q: What does this mean for the day-to-day development of Overture’s technology and datasets?
A: In our early days, many decisions were made in a startup-like fashion, oftentimes based on what member companies had done internally before. As we become a more mature organization, we need to think and act beyond the day-to-day, set priorities, and be even more intentional.
Q: This is what’s required to scale?
A: Yes. We are always talking to organizations interested in joining and collaborating with Overture. One of the things we learned was that, a lot of times, these organizations have questions about the roadmap, and they may have different requirements or areas of interest. So, as part of my role, we’ll be defining things that are highly relevant from a user perspective. It’s key that we have a good strategy that allows us to create an end product for those who want to use open data, while ensuring we have a clear understanding of how this all fits together. As a member-driven organization, it’s key that we think about this holistically and, at the same time, rigorously prioritize and focus.
Q: How will you balance the desires of different member companies and the broader ecosystem, in terms of the product roadmap?
A: As a member-driven organization, we have ways for members to lead, influence, and make decisions over what we’re doing. But even if one company wants something that really fits their needs, it still values understanding the needs of other members. Overture succeeds only by making the entire ecosystem more successful and drawing in even more participants. Ultimately, our strength lies in our collaborative, member-based model. While each member organization has unique needs, our ultimate goal is to build products that can benefit the entire ecosystem.
Q: Overture has released GA datasets and established the Global Entity Reference System, or GERS, as a standard to enable interoperability across datasets. What are the next steps going forward in terms of product?
A: A big focus will be on maintaining the data to ensure that it is fresh. Some data themes go stale more quickly than others. Almost a quarter of places turn over every year, for instance. We need a system that keeps this open data set up to date. We also have to become more representative of the world. We have about 55 million places in our data set. The world has many more than that, and we have to scale in that direction. For Places and other themes, this means getting higher coverage and more complete core data in the geographies we’re already focused on, maintaining that data, and then expanding into new geographies beyond our current focus. We’re also exploring how we might further leverage AI and ML for data validation and improvement.
Q: Before Overture, you worked at Google Maps as a product director. What brought you to Overture?
A: While at Google, I learned a lot about maps from all angles and particularly on building an ecosystem around maps. I also became very interested in open map data and its role in this ecosystem. I saw it as a great opportunity to innovate and bring something to the space where companies could start to focus on building on top of core map layers instead of having to run the entire mapping stack themselves.
I also saw how this could enable the ecosystem to focus on generating higher value, more differentiated map data. There is a shift toward much richer, more immersive maps for users, and an open maps baselayer can be the foundation that brings all these layers together. As open map data became a lot better and more ubiquitous, it became a good alternative for commercial products, public institutions, and many users and developers. It was a natural evolution for someone to say, “We have open map data in the ecosystem – let’s make it ready for consumption and enable others to build on top of it to accomplish what they want to do.” That’s what Overture has done for the open data ecosystem and that’s what attracted me to Overture.
Q: Besides open maps data, what excites you the most about your work at Overture?
A: One of the things that excites me most about Overture is the incredible talent driving our mission. I’m always impressed by the expertise and collaborative spirit of Overture’s and members’ teams. The passion and commitment to open maps is really inspiring, and I’m truly grateful to have the opportunity to work alongside such an amazing team. Together, we’ll build the future for Overture Maps and the entire maps and geospatial ecosystem.
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