Dmitri Dolgov of @Waymo on how to tell if you’re one year away from shipping or ten:

"One pattern that I've seen over and over again is do you have convergence of discovery? The problems that you are seeing today, how different are they from the problems you saw six months ago?"

"As you're pushing on the system, does it feel like you have stability, and you're just iteratively improving your metrics in the same areas?"

"Or does it feel like every six months the landscape is shifting from under you and the problems of today are very different from what you saw a while ago?

"If you don't have that stability, then that's often a good indicator that you got some ways to go."

"If you think you're six months or a year away from deployment, do you have a scorecard that if it were green today would allow you to deploy with confidence?"

"If you don't have one, you're saving that for later, often that turns out to be more difficult than you expected, and there's a long distance to go."

"But if you already have one and you're seeing stability in your discovery and stability in your metrics, and it's just a matter of closing the gap, that is a really good indicator that you're getting pretty close."

@dmitri_dolgov w/ South Park Commons