Product lessons from Waymo | Shweta Shrivastava (Waymo, Amazon, Cisco)

**Shweta Shrivastava** (0:00)
Are you proactively trying to challenge your own assumptions?
It's extremely important, right? As a beginner product manager, as well as a seasoned product leader, if you're not doing enough of that, then I think you might not be listening. If there's no conflict, if there's no contention, then something is missing.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:20)
Welcome to Lenny's Podcast, where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful products.
Today, my guest is Shweta Shrivastava. Shweta is Senior Director of Product Management at Waymo, which, if you're not familiar with Waymo, they are building self-driving cars that are already live on the streets in San Francisco, LA and Phoenix. I actually got to take a ride in one ahead of this chat, and you'll hear all about that in this episode. Before joining Waymo, Shweta was Chief Product Officer at Nauto, and AI started focusing on driver and automation safety. Before that, she was Head of Product Management at Amazon Web Services for their Database and Analytics Services, and before that, she was at Cisco. In our conversation, we delve into what it's like to work as a PM at Waymo, and how it's both different and similar to software-only products. We talk about their KPIs and goals at Waymo, including how they track progress towards a future of self-driving cars, how they build subtle cues and behaviors into the cars to create trust for the rider and also for other cars on the road. Plus, Shweta's biggest lessons about building products and teams across the many companies she's worked at. I can't wait for a future of every car being self-driving and it was super fun to learn about what goes into making this all happen. With that, I bring you Shweta Shrivastava after a short word from our sponsors.
This episode is brought to you by Vanta, helping you streamline your security compliance to accelerate your growth. Thousands of fast-growing companies like Gusto, Com, Quora and Modern Treasury trust Vanta to help build, scale, manage and demonstrate their security and compliance programs and get ready for audits in weeks, not months. By offering the most in-demand security and privacy frameworks such as SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, HIPAA and many more, Vanta helps companies obtain the reports they need to accelerate growth, build efficient compliance processes, mitigate risks to their businesses and build trust with external stakeholders. Over 5,000 fast-growing companies use Vanta to automate up to 90% of the work involved with SOC 2 and these other frameworks. For a limited time, Lenny's Podcast listeners get $1,000 off Vanta. Go to vanta.com/lenny. That's vanta.com/lenny to learn more and to claim your discounts. Get started today.
This episode is brought to you by public.com. We want to tell you about their new treasury accounts, which earn a 4.8% yield on your cash. That is higher than a high-yield savings account while still being backed by the full faith and credit of the US government. Treasury yields are at a 15-year high, but buying US treasuries is super complicated if you go to a bank or navigate an ancient government website. Or at least that was the case.
Now you can move your cash into US treasuries with the flexibility of a bank account. You can access your cash whenever you want, even before your treasury bills hit maturity. There are no hold periods, no settlement days, just a safe place to park your cash and earn a reliable yield. Public will automatically reinvest your treasury bills at maturity, so you don't have to do anything to continue growing your yield. And you can manage your treasuries alongside stocks, ETFs, crypto, and any alternative assets. Do all your investing in one place and earn 4.8%, a higher yield than a high yield savings account, only with a treasury account at public.com/lenny.
Shweta, welcome to the podcast.

**Shweta Shrivastava** (3:49)
Thank you. Great to be here.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:52)
It's great to have you. I thought we'd start with just a little bit about what it is you do at Waymo today.
What are you and your teams responsible for at Waymo?

**Shweta Shrivastava** (4:02)
Yeah, my teams are responsible for three key areas, I would say one is building a big part of the software that actually runs on board the fully autonomous vehicle and that determines the actual behavior and trajectory of the vehicle.
Secondly, building the simulation tools and technologies that are required to validate the performance of the system. And then third, one of the teams focused on commercially scaling our ride-hailing business, which is one of our key go-to-market applications for the technology we're building.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (4:33)
So as you know, you arranged a ride for me in a Waymo in San Francisco, it was actually a really rainy day and it was quite mind-blowing. I've never been in a self-driving car that had no driver sitting in the front. Like I have a Tesla and I turn on self-driving sometimes, but I've never experienced just sitting in the back and this thing just rides you around. Also just like a memory head is like the app to call the Waymo is like, it feels like Google Maps, except instead of just telling you how to get to a place, like a car shows up and just takes you there and then you could change course as you're driving and it's crazy how quickly it became normal. I'm just like, all right, we're just riding around San Francisco in this self-driving car and just sitting in the back and telling you where to go.