Product lessons from Waymo | Shweta Shrivastava (Waymo, Amazon, Cisco)
April 9, 2023
AI Summary
5 min readShweta Shrivastava, head of product for Waymo's ride-hailing service and formerly at Amazon and Cisco, discusses product management challenges in high-stakes domains like autonomous vehicles. She draws from experiences launching Waymo One to explain how to balance technical innovation with user needs, emphasizing data-driven iteration and psychological barriers in team decision-making.
Navigating uncertainty in product development
Shrivastava describes Waymo's approach to building self-driving cars amid incomplete data and safety risks. They use "safety frameworks" to quantify risks, like disengagement rates per mile, rather than absolute metrics. Psychologically, this counters overconfidence bias by forcing teams to confront uncertainties early—e.g., simulating edge cases in virtual worlds before real-road tests. She notes it works best when cross-functional teams (engineers, designers, operators) co-own metrics, preventing siloed optimism.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:00) **🎙️ Introduction: No Guest**
- 2 (01:45) **Recent Market Volatility**
- 3 (08:20) **Fed Policy Expectations**
- 4 (15:10) **Tech Sector Deep Dive**
- 5 (22:35) **Geopolitical Tensions**
- 6 (29:50) **Crypto Market Update**
- 7 (36:15) **Listener Q&A**
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Show Notes
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Shweta Shrivastava is a Senior Product Leader at Waymo, an autonomous driving technology company backed by Alphabet. Prior to joining Waymo, she was the CPO of Nauto, where she also worked on AI-assisted driver tools. Shweta has worked in product for over 15 years in senior roles at several companies, including Amazon and Cisco. In today’s episode, we discuss:
• How Waymo builds trust with riders
• Product management at Waymo vs software-only products
• The state of self-driving technology
• The importance of being a disruptor and why large companies need to disrupt more
• Underrated product management skills
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Find the full transcript at: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/product-lessons-from-waymo-shweta-shrivastava-waymo-amazon-cisco/#transcript
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Where to find Shweta Shriva
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shshrivastava/
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Where to find Lenny:
• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/lennysan
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/
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In this episode, we cover:
(00:00) Shweta’s background
(03:47) What Shweta and her team are responsible for at Waymo
(05:30) About the autonomous driving vehicle hardware, software, and simulation tools
(08:14) Differences in working at Waymo vs. a more traditional software company
(11:02) How Waymo builds trust with riders and the difference between driver assist and fully autonomous
(13:57) An example of how Waymo builds trust with riders
(15:55) The commercial, operational, and system behavior metrics Waymo uses
(20:38) What are L5 autonomous vehicles and why Shweta thinks L4 vehicles are good enough
(22:53) How to keep investors enthusiastic when it’s a long-term investment
(25:24) Building successful teams and successful products
(26:39) Determining what you’re not building, especially before product-market-fit
(27:49) Why large companies need to disrupt their own models
(29:33) The most underrated product management skills
(33:07) Tips for getting promoted
(35:19) Where is Waymo and how to try it out
(36:46) Lightning round
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