Question 1

What are the key takeaways from Shweta Shriva's episode on Lenny's Podcast?

Accepted Answer

1. MVP has a different meaning when safety is paramount -- you can't cut corners, so the minimum bar itself must be extremely high, fundamentally reshaping how you scope and ship. 2. Knowing what you're NOT building is as important as knowing what you are -- a product that tries to be all things to all people usually ends up going nowhere. 3. You need to disrupt yourself before somebody else does -- large companies that constantly challenge their own models and capabilities are the ones that truly succeed. 4. Show meaningful progress to maintain stakeholder buy-in -- results must speak for themselves through both technology advancement and commercial deployment, not short-term brownie points. 5. Challenge your own assumptions relentlessly -- if there's no conflict or contention in your product decisions, something is missing and you're probably not listening well enough.

Question 2

What does Shweta Shriva say about product-management and safety?

Accepted Answer

"We're using a lot of human driving data to train our deep models. So it's important to make sure that the behavior of the car doesn't seem robotic, it can feel quite unnatural. And from the get-go, we focused on building a fully autonomous system. So it's important to have that familiarity, that trust, building with the riders where they're not daunted by technology, they don't feel like they're sitting in our walk. It has to feel very human-like, but in a good way." - Shweta Shrivastava "I would say that the PMC has to be able to go technically indeed, compared to what they would do in other software products. They have to be able to get into the details as much as needed. They have to be okay with uncertainty and ambiguity." - Shweta Shrivastava "The concept of MVP, which is so widely popular in the SaaS product management world, has a whole new meaning here at Waymo when you work in a product like this because safety is on top of mind for all of us and can't really cut corners on safety. The MVP bar itself for safety is extremely high for us." - Shweta Shrivastava

Question 3

What are Shweta Shriva's views on product-management, safety, trust?

Accepted Answer

Shweta Shrivastava: "We're using a lot of human driving data to train our deep models. So it's important to make sure that the behavior of the car doesn't seem robotic, it can feel quite unnatural. And from the get-go, we focused on building a fully autonomous system. So it's important to have that familiarity, that trust, building with the riders where they're not daunted by technology, they don't feel like they're sitting in our walk. It has to feel very human-like, but in a good way." Shweta Shrivastava: "I would say that the PMC has to be able to go technically indeed, compared to what they would do in other software products. They have to be able to get into the details as much as needed. They have to be okay with uncertainty and ambiguity."

Shweta Shriva

Product lessons from Waymo | Shweta Shrivastava (Waymo, Amazon, Cisco)

TRANSCRIPT

Shweta Shriva

Product lessons from Waymo | Shweta Shrivastava (Waymo, Amazon, Cisco)

Shweta Shriva

Product lessons from Waymo | Shweta Shrivastava (Waymo, Amazon, Cisco)

TRANSCRIPT

Shweta Shriva

Product lessons from Waymo | Shweta Shrivastava (Waymo, Amazon, Cisco)