To Invent Waymo, They Had to Reinvent PM

In this episode, Saswat Panigrahi, Waymo's CPO, joins me for the third conversation in the "Inside PM" series. Saswat joined Waymo in 2016, back when it was still Google's self-driving car project and the entire product team was fewer than five people, and has spent all ten years since on the same product. In this episode, we discuss how his product org had to invent its own way of measuring good when there was no dashboard to check, why he hires and promotes for competence, courage, and compassion, and what it takes to be an executive builder at Waymo.

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Key topics:

• Cutting severe injuries "sixteen-fold"

• Why measuring good driving became its own product, staffed by dedicated eval PMs

• Why specifying what good looks like is AI's hardest problem

• Injecting rain and fog into simulated scenes instead of waiting a decade for the real thing

• The living room pitch to Waymo's first driverless riders

• Avoiding "Brownian motion": channeling vision into tracks a team can actually execute

• Spotting curiosity and grit in candidates in the age of AI

• Training to the point of failure

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