Product lessons from Waymo

Shweta Shrivastava, senior director of product management at Waymo, describes building the on-board software, simulation tools, and commercial ride-hailing business for fully autonomous vehicles. The conversation covers how Waymo designs trust and human-like driving behavior, the metrics used to measure progress, what makes PM work at Waymo different from software-only products, and broader lessons on customer focus, disruption, listening, and promotions.

01Key learnings

• Build autonomous driving to feel natural and predictable, using human driving data while discarding bad driving behavior, so riders trust the system.
• Expect the MVP bar to be far higher when safety is at stake, but still ship early and iterate on real-world deployment.
• Track both commercial/operational metrics (trips, active users, cost) and system behavior metrics (safety versus human benchmarks, stops and strands).
• Balance safety with progress: a system that never moves is safe but fails riders, so measure getting people to destinations on time.
• Show meaningful progress through real commercial deployments, which is what sustains long-term investor and leadership buy-in.
• Work backwards from the customer problem, as Amazon's PR/FAQ practice does, and be explicit about what you are not building.
• Disrupt yourself before an upstart does; large companies that keep challenging their own models tend to succeed.
• Build listening and empathy through repeated exposure to different teams and environments, and proactively challenge your own assumptions.

02Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.