“Can you tell me about the PM culture at Lyft …?”

This is a question we hear from many candidates during interviews at Lyft. It’s a fair question because a team’s culture is a big part of what makes it successful. In this post, I’ll share my personal experience of what PM culture at Lyft is like.

Before we dive in, let me tell you a little bit about myself. I have been a PM at Lyft for 2 years now. I joined the company after spending over 5 years at Google as part of their Search org. I joined Lyft because I genuinely felt like I would be working with an amazing set of people, and I haven’t changed my mind during the 2 years that I’ve spent here.

The TL;DR of Lyft’s PM culture is:

• Focus on impact above everything else.
• Take care of each other and create an inclusive environment.
• Go above and beyond to serve our users with high quality products and hospitality that they can rely on.

Company culture

We have a written set of values that we call the “Guide to Making it Happen” which applies to everyone at the company:

• Wow our customers — go above and beyond to build high quality products.
• All-in ownership — we never say, “that’s not my job”.
• Take Care of Each Other — create an environment where everyone is safe to be themselves.
• Create Fearlessly — have a bias for action and make bold, calculated risks.
• Take Pride, Be Humble — we take pride in our work, but we also acknowledge our shortcomings.
• Build Great Teams — recruit and develop exceptional people.
• Disagree & Commit — engage in thoughtful, direct, and respectful debate.
• Dive Deep — don’t take anything at face value.
• Inspire — start with a big vision and work backwards.
• Deliver Impact — the end result is what counts.

These principles are the foundation for how we operate and how we are organized as a team. As we’ll see in this post, it is also the foundation for how Lyft has shaped its PM culture.

PM Culture

Strong product vision

We have a powerful 3-year vision and it is big, bold, and ambitious. Success in realizing this vision will significantly grow our business and further our mission. It is rare to work at a place which is driving both social and financial impact.

Focus on impact

Nearly everything we work on as PMs has a true and meaningful impact on the business. The strong 3-year vision for our product ensures we are all working towards the same goal. As a result, folks all across the company and up through our founders care about the work being done!

Founder led: Lyft is a publicly traded company where within the first 3–6 months after joining, PMs should expect to have face time with the founders. This really stood out to me and speaks to the level of personal attention received here.

Culture of doing the right thing

We are in the business of getting people to their destinations. But more than that, we are also providing a livelihood for our drivers. A happy driver can make trips better for their riders. We strive to create win-win-win situations at every turn. Even more, we’re working to build a future where cities are designed around people. This is a gigantic goal, and we are trying to achieve it by making it easy, reliable, and cost effective to get around with the best transportation available. We work with cities to bring beautifully designed Lyft bike hubs to markets — rather than dumping a bunch of bikes on the sidewalk.

Culture of sharing

We know that good ideas can come from anywhere in the company, and we want to enable everyone to pitch in. In order to spread awareness about what’s happening, we publish 3Ps internally: Progress, Plans and Problems. These include everything from celebrating progress, informing about upcoming plans, and raising awareness about problems to help unblock them. My org lead, Dylan Lorimer, has been instrumental in enabling PMs to get feedback from their peers through a “product doc review” forum. Each week a PM presents a doc (spec / strategy / process proposal) in the forum. We all read through it silently for the first 15 minutes before discussing it together. This is a great way for PMs to both validate their ideas and to generate new ones with their peers, and it’s been a tremendous learning experience for me both as a presenter and as a reviewer.

Empowering teams and judgment-based decision making

Launch decisions are made and owned by the cross-functional team. We are empowered to review experiment results and ship things only when the results make sense. We do not have to escalate each launch to the senior leadership team unless the scale of the launch warrants it.

Culture is evolving

Our culture is shaped by the people involved. We do not have decades of institutionalized culture like other Silicon Valley mega corporations. Rather, we have a fluid culture that was shaped by the early days but is still evolving today. Lyft PMs have the opportunity to lean into other initiatives such as hiring, career pathways, and promo committees. For example, our APM (Associate Product Manager) program didn’t exist until people like Anna Campanelli leaned in to create it. We’re at a sweet spot where we are still able to define what the Lyft PM and broader company culture is.

Abundant scope

Lyft’s company size is ideal in that we aren’t too small to provide support, but we also aren’t so large that PMs step on each other’s toes. With our PM team growing every day, team members are very much empowered to spread their wings and grow here.

Summary

I want to emphasize the two things that stand out to me most at Lyft: The outstanding people that work here, and the care that this company gives to creating an inclusive environment.

I leave you with this example: My colleague David Zunigahelped a driver recover a missed bonus. This made such a personal impact on the driver that they dropped off a box of cupcakes at the Portland Hub. We are not just shipping great products, we are impacting people’s lives.

Cupcakes dropped off as a treat from a Lyft driver

If you’re interested in joining us on our mission, our product team is hiring!