The setup
My first corporate job: enriching HERE's Western Europe maps point-of-interest by point-of-interest, using Atlas, the company's proprietary mapping software. Field teams collected locations on paper-era workflows; analysts entered them after the fact. It worked, slowly.
The idea
Then Pokémon Go came out in July 2016, and I was playing it. What stuck with me was not the game - it was how casually it used geo-tagged capture to anchor a digital object to an exact physical place. We were paying for that same truth the slow way. So I proposed an in-house mobile app for the field unit: geo-tagged photo capture, exact coordinates by default. My manager let me lead the operations side, and I partnered with the development team to ship it.
What happened
- POI capture rate went from 30 to 65 per hour - a ~117% improvement
- Accuracy held at 99.93%
- A 15-month delivery plan finished in 8.5 months
- HERE awarded it the Golden Impulse Award for Process and Product Excellence, May 2017
Why this chapter matters
This is the origin story. See a process inefficiency, borrow a mechanic from consumer tech you actually use, get buy-in, ship with engineers, measure the result. I did not know the title for that loop yet. I just knew I wanted to keep doing it - and that I wanted the domain underneath it to be money. I left maps for a Master of Management Studies in Finance.