The navigation service Waze is laying off 5% of its global personnel.
The company employs 550 people around the world, and with the decision, 30 of them who are mostly from the company’s sales, marketing, and partnerships divisions, are getting fired.
Amid to the 'COVID-19' coronavirus pandemic which resulted in many lockdowns around the world, many are shifting large portions of their workforce from office to home. As a result of this, mobility decreases. This in turn made Waze to also experience a decrease in users, which in turn led to a reduced ad exposure.
Waze Carpool, the company’s two-year-old ride-share service, is also suffering. With more people working from home, fewer people are using the service to share their rides with co-workers or other neighbors who work along a similar route.
With less income, Waze is forced to lay off some of its workforce, as well as the closure of its offices in several countries in the Asia-Pacific (Malaysia, Singapore) and Latin America regions (Colombia, Chile and Argentina).
This way, Waze hopes to refocuses its business only on particular markets (the U.S., France, the UK, Brazil, Canada, Italy and Mexico), at least during the crisis.
The decision was announced in an email sent to Waze employees from CEO Noam Bardin.
"These investments ensure the long-term success of Waze and that we exit this pandemic stronger than we entered it," Bardin said, adding that "Letting Wazers go is an extremely painful process for all of us. I want to make it clear that these reductions are being made due to the constraints created by the pandemic and to support investments in our focus areas, and not because of anyone’s actions or performance."
In the email, Bardin wrote that Waze was forced to “rethink priorities” and decided to focus resources on product improvements and accelerate investments in technical infrastructure.
He added that sales and marketing efforts would be refocused on a small number of high-value countries. Accordingly, Waze will close its offices in Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Malaysia and reduce its activities in Latin America.
In an April blog post on Medium, Waze revealed how the coronavirus pandemic made Waze users globally to drive 60% fewer miles compared to the February daily average for a two-week period (2/11/2020–2/25/2020)
It was worse in countries where quarantine measures were most strictly enforced, like in Italy, where Waze experienced more than a 90% drop.
As the pandemic continued, global weekly driven miles continued to depress down to an average low of around -70%.
Waze CEO Noam Bardin note to his staff reads:
With the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, many cities and countries have enforced travel restrictions to curb the spread of the disease, so it’s no surprise that our users are driving less (or have stopped altogether), leading to a significant drop in kilometers driven (KMDs), Carpools, and Ad revenue.
This has forced us to rethink priorities and we’ve decided to focus our resources on product improvements for our users, accelerate our investments in technical infrastructure, and refocus our sales and marketing efforts on a small number of high-value countries. These investments ensure the long-term success of Waze and that we exit this pandemic stronger than we entered it.
I have always strived to maintain a transparent culture at Waze, so I want to share with you that in order to continue and accelerate our investment in Engineering and other technical positions, I have decided to close 30 roles in other parts of Waze. I’m sorry this email is coming over at such a late hour but I wanted to make sure we reached out to all impacted employees first.
At a high-level, these are the impacted areas:
Ads Sales Team: The Ads team will pare back and focus on the key markets that drive 93% of revenue and carry 95% of the KMDs we sell in. This means we will be closing the on-the-ground Sales offices in APAC (Singapore, Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia) and smaller LATAM markets (Colombia, Argentina, Chile). We will continue servicing these countries via increased investments in Waze Local Starter, supported by our SMB teams in our main sales hubs.
Partnership Team: Uncertainty of back-to-work plans from our employer partners and with employees continuing to work from home means that we will be shrinking the Carpool Partnerships team. Our narrowed product focus also means we’ll reduce our product partnerships and private & public sector teams.
Marketing Team: The focus on fewer markets and adjustments in our partnership investments means that we will be reducing the size of the Marketing team.
Performance Marketing Team: We are making investments in Product to support our Growth efforts and are restructuring the Performance Marketing team to realign around these efforts.
Letting Wazers go is an extremely painful process for all of us. I want to make it clear that these reductions are being made due to the constraints created by the pandemic and to support investments in our focus areas, and not because of anyone’s actions or performance.
The leaving Wazers were a critical part of our growth up to now and it is important that we take care of those leaving as best we can. Our goal is to try and help as much as possible and ease this process for them. We’ve done our best to support those affected with a severance package that includes:
Career Transition: The Google Internal Mobility teams have been working with us and will help all impacted employees search for opportunities within Google.
Outplacement Services: We will be offering outplacement services to all impacted employees from the date of the notice through six month after employment.
Financial: Given the circumstances of the year, we have worked closely with the internal HR teams to ensure that everyone has been taken care of through early 2021 and will be eligible for year-end bonuses.
Healthcare: We are giving each impacted employee as many continued benefits as possible, in accordance with local law.
I ask that we all help in any way we can and support our colleagues, both in highlighting internal roles at Google that we may know about and external opportunities we may be aware of.
I want to thank all of the impacted team members — Waze has become what it is because of your contributions. These changes are happening due to a global pandemic, and none of this is your fault. We have no doubt that you will bring your talents to a new team and help them become even better, as you’ve done at Waze.
Thank you.
Noam
It should be noted that the overall headcount within the company may remain unchanged, as Waze plans to hire new staff to its technology and engineering teams as travel restrictions start to ease.
Waze is an Israeli startup, acquired by Google in 2013 for a reported $1.1 billion.
