Chinmay Jain is Waymo’s Director of Product for Driving Behavior, where he drives critical autonomy work, defining how autonomous vehicles move through dense urban environments. He has been honored as the “Top Product Strategist in Behavioral Tech & Mobility – 2025” by CToday Awards. His path includes strategy at McKinsey, venture capital investing at Accel Partners, and starting the music-technology startup String Wars. Following the receipt of a full-tuition merit fellowship at Chicago Booth, he grew YouTube’s Movies business 10x via 50+ feature rollouts and partnerships. At Waymo, he led work on road rules and improper stops, and now directs a high-impact team propelling safe, scalable autonomous mobility.

Early Career and Venture Experience

Chinmay began his career at McKinsey & Co. and worked side by side with Fortune 500 CXOs, developing growth strategies and operational improvements. From this experience, he gained a solid foundation in structured problem-solving, strategic planning, and stakeholder alignment. To get nearer to the innovation ecosystem, he became an associate at Accel Partners. There, he sized up early-stage tech startups, developed his skill at recognizing market-defining products, and got intensely familiar with balancing long-term risk versus possible reward. Ready to transition from strategy to execution, Chinmay co-founded String Wars, a mobile music collaboration app that went on to see over 200,000 worldwide downloads. He directed end-to-end product design, executed user-growth experiments, and oversaw global rollouts, having first-hand experience in creating and growing a product. To further hone his business and leadership skills, Chinmay pursued an MBA at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, where he was given a full-tuition merit fellowship for his academic achievement and potential for leadership.

Recognition and Accolades at Waymo

Following Booth, Chinmay moved to Google’s YouTube organization to develop the Movies product, driving revenue growth tenfold through partnerships, local content growth, and over 50 feature launches. In 2018, he joined Waymo, where his biggest goal was reducing “improper stops” cases. By creating a strong product vision, establishing intense scenario-based testing, and uniting engineering, data science, and operations teams under a common goal, he spearheaded a dramatic reduction in these. His leadership directly contributed to Waymo’s safe urban deployments.

Advice for Aspiring Professionals

Chinmay’s leadership is shaped by three core principles: clarity, ownership, and resilience. He urges emerging technologists to develop clarity by setting bold, measurable goals and communicating them often. Ownership means empowering peers to lead while allowing room for learning from mistakes. Resilience comes from embracing ambiguity and pushing through setbacks, especially vital in the evolving field of autonomous driving. Looking ahead, he sees end-to-end foundation models and advanced simulation for validation as key industry drivers. He advises young professionals to build cross-disciplinary skills, seek mentors who challenge them, and stay curious about how technology reshapes complex systems.