Shweta Shrivastava
Senior Director of Product Management at Waymo. Previously Chief Product Officer at Nauto (AI dashcam safety platform), Head of Product at AWS (databases and analytics), and product roles at Cisco.
Shrivastava works at the intersection of safety-critical hardware, deep learning systems, and consumer product management — a combination that forces a rethinking of almost every conventional PM instinct, starting with the definition of MVP.
Key positions
- The MVP bar in safety-critical systems is categorically different from software: you cannot iterate on a feature that fails with life-or-death consequences.
- Autonomous vehicles communicate intent through positioning and movement — self-driving body language encoded via deep learning on human driving data.
- L4 autonomy (fully autonomous within a defined ODD) and L5 (any environment) are not points on a continuous spectrum; they are structurally different problems.
- Success at Waymo is measured on two parallel KPI tracks: commercial (trips, active users, cost per trip) and system behaviour (safety per 100k miles vs human benchmark, strands, traffic impact).
- ‘Are you proactively trying to challenge your own assumptions?’ is both a design principle and a career practice.