Shrivastava: Autonomous vehicles must learn location-specific social driving norms
Shweta Shrivastava · Product lessons from Waymo | Shweta Shrivastava (Waymo, Amazon, Cisco) · Apr 9, 2023 · at 7:31
Shweta Shrivastava, Senior Director of Product Management at Waymo, discusses why autonomous vehicles must be engineered to navigate implicit social conventions beyond formal traffic rules.
0:00 / 0:24exact quote · 24.8s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“A lot of driving is also social norms, right? It's if you, if you're in a particular, you know, section in San Francisco, you know, maybe it's okay for pedestrians to cross even when they don't have a walk sign, right? Another city, another intersection might have a different social norm when it comes to pedestrians crossing the four-way stop sign or the crosswalk or what have you. And so the car also has to learn about those social norms and be able to react to it.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Shweta Shrivastava
Shrivastava: Waymo engineered for full autonomy from inception, unlike Tesla
“Since you mentioned Tesla, you know, I just want to clarify that it's a different system that we're building, right? Which is for Waymo, we started by solving the problem of fully autonomous driving without a human driver at the wheel from the get-go, right? I…”
Shrivastava: Level 5 autonomy may end up being a niche technology
“L five, I'm not sure, you know, maybe that becomes more niche, et cetera. It solves very specific use cases.”
Shrivastava: Autonomous vehicles require a fundamentally higher MVP bar due to safety
“The concept of MVP, right, which is so Why be popular in the SaaS product management world or product management world in general has a whole new meaning here at Babel when you work on a product like this, because safety is, is, you know, top of mind for all o…”
Shrivastava: Autonomous vehicles must balance safety with assertiveness to make progress
“Hey, you can be very safe if you're not moving at all. That's not what we're building, right? We need to make sure that the riders get to their destination on time. So it has to be making, it has to be appropriately assertive and be making the right progress.”
Shrivastava: Absence of Contention in Product Work Signals Ineffective Listening
“If you're not doing enough of that, then I think you might not be listening well. Or you might not be picking on sort of the cues. Then you're just, if there's no conflict, if there's no contention, Then something is missing.”
Shrivastava: Switch to a live conversation after seven unresolved emails
“If there have been seven emails. In an email thread and you still haven't resolved the issue, just call the person or get in a room, huddle, resolve it live. But you know, the long email exchanges that don't converge and go anywhere, I feel are a waste of time…”