Shweta Shrivastava: evaluation

Transcript context

…I don't know, Amazon's pretty cool, but I totally get you. I worked at Amazon, I'm a fan. And they have been pretty transformational with AWS and on the eCommerce side. But a fully autonomous driving system, it's also a very, very hard problem. So it's transformational from that perspective too. 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. Again, I think, that is part and parcel of any product management role, but it's even more so here. This is a long game and so you have to have the tenacity to play the long game and be continuously improving the product and make this thing a broad reality and future. So, those are some of the attributes. I would also say that there is some level of self selection here. You have to be driven by the mission to make the roads safer. We have about 1.35 million debts that happen every year across the world from traffic accidents and most of that is attributable to driving errors and driver distraction. I've been guilty of checking my text messages while driving. I've seen other drivers do that. But a fully autonomous technology, you don't have that risk. That's the risk we're trying to minimize. So they have to be driven by that mission. One other thing is that the concept of MVP, which is so widely popular in the SaaS product management world or product management world, in general, 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. So, the core product management philosophy also, getting an MVP out there and then iterating with the real world deployment. It applies, but it's just a different bar on that MVP. Touching again on safety and human behavior, I was thinking a little bit as we're chatting about, say of Tesla, which has self-driving car, self-driving capabilities and intellectually I know it's probably going to drive a lot better than I am, but I still feel like I need to disengage it occasionally when I'm on a curvy road. I'm just like, I don't know about this, I don't want to leave room for error if there's something that weird that happens. And I imagine someone designing product for that weird behavior where I should probably trust it because it's probably a lot better driver than I am, but I don't know, I feel like I can do a better job. Is there anything you've learned about, I don't know, human behavior or how to design software for these sorts of experiences that maybe surprised you or thought was really interesting or that was really important?…

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