Shweta Shrivastava: recommendation

Transcript context

…Do you do that at Waymo or do you folks do that? Is there kind of a system there or? The explicit PR FAQ process that Amazon follows is, I think, Waymo has its own version of it. But it is about sort of focusing on the customer problem. Now, Waymo is also a very different kind of product. It's highly integrated. And different types of product management flavors, if you will. Some are more technically focused and technically deep, some are more commercially focused. So they all adapt. They have their versions of working backwards from the customer problem. But that still remains the core tenant in my mind. The other big lesson, at least working in some of the large companies that I have had is it's also very important to know what you're not building. And this one is not only in big companies, I would say even in startups, it's extremely important to know what you're not building because you could very easily get swayed by customer X telling you to do this, customer y telling you to do that. And a product that tries to be all things to all people usually doesn't end up going anywhere. So that focus, that prioritization and being crisp about what you're building and what you're not building is very important. And then, in the context of the large companies, what I was going to say was, I think, is the classic innovator's dilemma. The large companies tend to be the market share leaders in their focus areas. And so, the product team and the product leaders can get very incremental in their product strategy and then lo and behold, you see an upstart that comes and disrupts them. And so, I have definitely learned the lesson that you need to disrupt yourself before somebody else does because it's going to happen. It's inevitable. And large companies that are constantly challenging themselves and disrupting their own models or their own product capabilities to bring those, even something more transformational for the customers, are the ones that really succeed. And I think this is where the product leaders have to bring in that mindset of, hey, are we getting too complacent or it's time to just. That's such a good reminder. Is there an example of you doing that or something you worked on where you got the company to commit to something that maybe could have been a threat from a disruptor or maybe even just seen that happening at a company? Just like is there a specific project or investment that comes to mind?…

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