Shweta Shrivastava on Waymo, Self-Driving Body Language, and PM at Autonomy Scale
Shweta Shrivastava and Lenny Rachitsky on what it means to be a PM at Waymo — where a failed deployment is a safety incident, not a learning opportunity — including how autonomous vehicles communicate through motion, how Waymo measures success, and what the PM craft looks like when the MVP bar is life-and-death.
Key ideas
- Self-driving body language. Waymo’s vehicles communicate intent to other road users through positioning and movement rather than language. The system must account for city-specific social norms — driving etiquette in San Francisco differs from Phoenix. Deep learning models trained on human driving data encode these implicit conventions.
- L4 vs L5 autonomy. L4 is fully autonomous within a defined operational design domain (ODD) and mapped geography, with no human driver required. L5 is any environment, any conditions — not yet achieved by anyone. Waymo operates in L4.
- The MVP bar is different at safety scale. The conventional SaaS instinct — ship something imperfect, learn fast — does not apply when the downside is a collision. The standard is safety relative to a human driver benchmark, not feature completeness. This reshapes every product instinct.
- Two KPI layers. Commercial metrics (trips per week, daily/weekly active users, funnel conversion, cost per trip) sit alongside system behaviour metrics (safety incidents per 100k miles vs human benchmark, stops and strands, traffic impact). Both must be optimised simultaneously.
- Amazon PR/FAQ applied. Shrivastava brings the Amazon working-backwards practice — write the press release for the finished product before building — into an environment where the finished product is a decade in the future. The discipline forces teams to articulate what success actually looks like at full scale.
- Challenging your own assumptions. ‘Are you proactively trying to challenge your own assumptions’ is the question Shrivastava returns to repeatedly — both as a design principle and a career practice.