Breaking Through Bottlenecks: How Lyft Scaled To Success [SIGNAL Rewind]

Breaking Through Bottlenecks: How Lyft Scaled To Success [SIGNAL Rewind]

Lyft has scaled rapidly to say the least. They’re valued at over two-billion, and recently raised a billion dollars, with 500 million of that coming from General Motors.

If you used Lyft back in 2013, you might have had trouble getting a Lyft on a Friday night. They didn’t have enough people driving with Lyft then. This is the struggle of a two-sided marketplace – you need passengers so drivers can work. You need drivers so passengers don’t stand out on a corner waiting for a ride.

In order to scale at rapid speed, Lyft focused on self-onboarding and mentorship.

Whether you’re pressing the “request lyft” or “accept ride” button, you’re probably on-boarding yourself.

“You need a lot of drivers and you need a lot of passengers. Most importantly, you need to be able to scale them at the same time,” says Ben Lauzier, Growth Product Manager at Lyft. Self on-boarding was key to achieving that scale.

Here’s a highlight from last year’s SIGNAL as Ben runs down how Lyft shipped broke through their own bottlenecks on the way to success.