It is hard to imagine a life without Google Maps (I’ve lived that life, though can’t remember how I survived navigation before Google Maps). Yet, the journey of how this product came to life is a story of near-failure, unexpected turns, and innovation. In Never Lost Again, Bill Kilday—former marketing head at Keyhole and a key figure in the Maps team—shares the behind-the-scenes of Google Maps product.
Top three things I learnt from this book.
1. Google Maps Was Almost Killed—But Grit and Belief Kept It Alive
Even before the acquisition, Keyhole project had multiple near death moment. Even after Keyhole was acquired by Google, the product didn’t immediately fit the company’s core strategy. Internally, Maps was seen as a side project—a distraction that didn’t align with Google’s search and ad business. The team was under constant pressure to prove its value, fighting for headcount, compute resources, and executive attention. It wasn’t until a confluence of factors—including CNN using Keyhole during the Iraq War and a compelling demo to Google’s founders—that the team gained momentum. Still, the path to success involved fighting against internal resistance, lack of resources, and even the threat of shutdown.
2. Storytelling Made the Tech Matter
Kilday, coming from a marketing background, recognized early that the Maps team needed to create emotional resonance with its product. The team didn’t just show off features—they told stories about how people could interact with geography in a whole new way. The “you-are-here” experience became a powerful narrative that made Maps not just useful, but personal and intuitive. That story helped sell the idea internally and win over skeptics, including Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
3. Limitations Fuel Creativity
Working with limited bandwidth, slow processors, and fragmented satellite data, the engineers at Keyhole had to compress massive datasets, render map tiles in real time, and deliver a seamless user experience long before smartphones were ready for it. These limitations led to invention. The team pioneered technical tricks like quadtree tiling and GPU-based rendering that later became foundational to all maps products out there.
I’ve read a lot of books about Amazon, Apple and Netflix early stage. This is the first time I’ve read a book about Google product. A must-read for early stage founders or for anyone building 0-1 products.