Navigation Like Never Before: Customizing Maps for Mission-Critical Products — The Next Geo 2026
As location services evolve into critical digital infrastructure, navigation experiences are the ultimate test. Whether for in-vehicle directions, on-demand fleet logistics, or guiding cyclists and pedestrians, live navigation presents the highest demands for user experience, data accuracy, map design, and rendering performance. In this fireside chat session from Day 1 of The Next Geo 2026, hosted by Geoawesome, technical leaders from Mapbox go behind the scenes to discuss how their teams approach product development. Get insights into what it takes to build a developer-friendly, production-ready Navigation SDK. About the speakers: • Liam Bresnahan is a Principal Product Manager at Mapbox for the automotive navigation product portfolio. His products — 3D Lanes, 3D Live Navigation, and ADAS — deliver lane-level HD mapping and real-time environmental awareness to in-vehicle systems for Automotive OEMs. Before Mapbox, Liam spent fifteen years building consumer technology products at the boundary of hardware, software, and infrastructure, including at TiVo (formerly Xperi), Microsoft, and Amazon Fire TV. • Åsa Forsell is a Senior Product Manager for the Mapbox Maps SDKs and 3D rendering. Her work focuses on pushing the frontiers of mobile mapping to help developers build reliable and engaging map experiences that users want to return to. Åsa has spent 10+ years at tech startups focused on computer graphics. She delivered real-time 3D user interface technology to tens of millions of vehicles across all major OEMs while working at Rightware and Qt. She also served as Head of Product at Hatch, a subsidiary of Angry Birds maker Rovio, where she worked on an educational mobile game streaming platform. • Greg Banecker has spent the last 4 years with Mapbox as Product Marketing Manager. Prior to that, he worked in the attractions and travel space. Whether it’s mapping the world or discovering it firsthand, Greg has always had a passion for helping people understand and explore the countries and cultures of our planet. About the host organizations: Mapbox is the location platform for innovators. Headquartered in San Francisco, Mapbox provides developers and businesses with cloud-based APIs, SDKs, and data services for maps, navigation, and place and address search. Founded in 2010, Mapbox leads development of the modern geospatial stack. Trusted by automakers, logistics providers, retailers, and app developers, Mapbox delivers scalable, highly customizable geospatial solutions that power billions of sophisticated location experiences worldwide. The platform is known for its built-in flexibility, elegant design, enterprise-grade security, strict data privacy, and developer-first documentation. The mission of Mapbox is to enable every team to build exceptional, location-aware applications that delight users, enhance operations, and transform industries. Learn more at mapbox.com. Geoawesome is the world’s largest geospatial community united by its belief in the power of location technology to transform the world for the better. Since its founding in 2011, Geoawesome (previously Geoawesomeness) has striven to be an open and inclusive platform for geospatial experts and enthusiasts to share their passion, knowledge, and expertise for all things geo. Today over 300+ professionals have shared their expertise via the platform at https://geoawesomeness.com/