By Yuko Yamazaki a Senior Director of Engineering on Lyft’s Customer Platform Team & the Founder of Lyft’s Equitable Development Initiative (EDI).

Lyft’s Tech Diversity

Over the last three years, Lyft has increased the representation of Underrepresented Minorities (URM) in technical leadership roles by more than three times. At Lyft, URM is defined as team members from Women, Black, and Latinx communities, and technical leadership roles are defined as Staff+ IC and M1+ manager roles. This was not an easy task, as it is known in the industry to be hard to fill these roles from the URM community. Lyft has done this by developing and retaining URM talent within the company. As the founder and the leader of the Equitable Development Initiative (EDI) program at Lyft, in this article I will share some tips that got us these results.

Why this was the problem to solve

I’ve always been passionate about uplifting URM communities in Tech. I grew up in Japan and was raised in a traditional household where my mother took care of the family and my father worked full-time, a.k.a a salaryman. Their goal was to raise me to follow in my mother’s footsteps. A career working and thriving in Tech was not what they pictured for me, so I had a lot of doubts in my career. With a few amazing advocates who believed in me, and lots of hard work and luck, I’ve gotten my career to where it is today. Inspired by my own story, I’ve been devoting my time to giving back to Tech URM communities ever since I became a director ten years ago.

Through hiring, I’ve increased URM representation 2–3 times in my organizations at multiple companies. I’ve done this through community outreach, leadership influence, and interview process enhancements. It takes effort, but it works! However, I’ve learned the hard way that the results from hiring are not sustainable, nor do they change the organization’s fundamental culture. Evidently, every time I left an organization or company, the results went back down. I needed to come up with a different, more aggressive and consistent strategy.

Birth of EDI

In 2020, Vicki Cheung and I pitched that shifting our focus from hiring to retention and growth of the existing URM employees will not only get us a higher URM representation, but also it will fundamentally change the company’s culture in a long-lasting way. We did this by presenting to VPs and senior directors both quantitative Human Resources data and qualitative voices of employees. In this 30 minute session, we secured their buy-in unanimously and received the budget to support the program. A month later, Lyft’s EDI program was born with the initial scope being the Lyft Engineering organization.

Success To Date

In three years since the launch of EDI, the % of staff engineers and the % of senior engineering managers who are from the URM communities have increased by 2–3 times. The increase in promotion percentage and retention percentage for URM Lyft employees were the biggest contributors to these result. The impact has been consistent at all levels and particularly strong for the individual contributor (IC) track.

Furthermore, the program adoption from Lyft’s URM community has been consistently strong. Over 1,000 employees in tech roles have participated in EDI, which is over 70% of tech employees at Lyft. In the URM engineering community at Lyft over 50% prioritize their career development at Lyft by leveraging EDI programming.

With the success in Engineering, Lyft has expanded the program to all Lyft Tech including Data Science, Product Management, Technical Program Management, and Design, with a focus on increasing URM representation internationally as the company expands sites in Eastern Europe, Canada, and Mexico City.

Overcoming Challenges

I’ve run and participated in many Diversity and Inclusion programs and there are four main reasons why they haven’t achieved significant results:

1. Low adoption from URM communities: Research shows that URM members are often busy, taking tasks that benefit the teams but not themselves. Because of their busy schedule, even when programs are available to benefit their career growth, URM members do not sign up on their own. Companies offer the programs for all employees in the name of equitability. So, even if the program was meant for the URM members, what often ends up happening is that the program ends up being leveraged by non-URM members more than URM members.
2. Lack of data: Lack of data was one of the biggest challenges that Lyft’s EDI program had to overcome. Diversity and workforce data is sensitive and thus for diversity programs it can be hard to be data-driven. You need to work closely and collaboratively with the Legal and Human Resources Analytics teams and have a defined strategy that leverages just enough data to ensure the program’s continued success while respecting people’s privacy.
3. Lack of leadership commitment: I believe you have to know what it is like to be a minority in the industry to be able to identify diversity, inclusion, and equity problems and solve them. While there are a lot of leaders in the industry who want to fix these problems, due to their lack of personal experience, they often don’t know where to start. This causes them to lose commitment or priority towards long-term initiatives, such as EDI.
4. No lasting energy: Diversity and inclusion working groups take on a ton of responsibility for the entire community and slowly dissolve due to fatigue. Kicking off is fun and inspiring, but sustained investment is challenging.

Knowing these challenges upfront have helped Vicki and I to design EDI in a way to overcome them and scale for sustainable impact. Here are highlights of Lyft EDI’s success:

1. Leverage people in tech with direct and personal experience: Do not move the problem to Human Resources to solve; own the problem within the Tech Organization and come up with a solution that works for you. Conduct focus groups and listening sessions for feedback before, during, and after the program launches and maintain a bottoms-up (as opposed to top-down) program development approach. There are passionate employees in the organization; leverage their skills. At Lyft, over 100 Tech employees volunteer in EDI each year to build, improve, and maintain EDI — including directors and VPs.
2. EDI dashboard: This took work, but we have created a daily EDI dashboard that captures the URM representation with an ability to zoom in or out to slice the data in multiple ways. The dashboard also shows a waterfall visual of what has contributed to the overall numbers — hiring, promotions, transfers, and attrition. Although the dashboard is only viewable to directors who are program sponsors, having the data has helped us pivot the program as appropriate. We work closely with the Legal, Human Resources, and the Human Resources Analytics teams to build for the long term and use the data to quantifiably detect issues and measure success. The directors also look at engagement survey results, exit interview results, as well as roundtable qualitative feedback on a regular basis.
3. Continuous offering: It’s important to build a program that works for all employees regardless of where they are in their career stage. Lyft’s EDI program offers a series of subprograms that help all employees who are getting ready for promotions, starting to thrive in newly promoted positions, or exploring different teams in the company.
4. Senior leadership involvement: Senior leaders want to support, but they don’t always know how. Be clear on what they can do to make an impact. There are many ways they can contribute, such as being a coach, sponsor, panelist, or presenter. We also assign an executive sponsor for each subprogram.
5. Program builder rotation: In order to bring fresh ideas and maintain high-energy for the EDI program, we have created a six-month volunteer rotation with around 4–6 hours of time commitment each month. The leads of the subprograms are the former working group members from the previous cycle to keep continuity from one cycle to another. This design has organically established a tremendous number of URM allies in Engineering.

Future

I believe that this framework for Lyft’s EDI program can be repurposed in other organizations and companies and I’m excited to share this with the hope that it can help increase URM communities in Tech around the world. I would love to engage with your organization on these topics; let me know what you think in the comments section or reach out on LinkedIn!

Special Thanks

Vicki Cheung — the Co-Founder of the Lyft EDI program; I miss you Vicki! Hannah Reinbold — the fully-dedicated EDI Program Manager who has expanded the program to all tech. Patrick Sunday, Han Kim, Chrissie Kawasaki, Priyanka Phatak and Natalie Pendragon who have been the program leads with me. Pete Morelli, Amy Farrow, Guy Bayes, and Manish Gupta — the original sponsors who invested in the program to launch. Ashwin Raj, Chris Lambert, Curtis Scott, and Kalpana Jogi — the current sponsors who accelerated the results through their advocacy. Nupur Shah, Cecelia Tyree, and Sherida McMullan — the program’s Human Resources and Legal partners. Millie Walsh — who has led the EDI Internal Opportunity program and helped me publish this blog. And to the hundreds of coaches, sponsors, and working group members at from across Lyft Tech.

Lyft is hiring! If you’re passionate about working for a company with a commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion; join our team!