An Interview Guide to the Lyft APM Program 👏
How to create a great take-home, stand out in product design questions, and perfect your elevator pitch
Thank you to Helen Wu, an incoming Lyft APM (starting tomorrow!) for contributing this interview guide. As always, we welcome fresh content on product strategy, interviewing, or excelling in a product role. If interested in contributing to The Aspiring PM, please fill out this form or reach out via LinkedIn DM.
About Helen
For context, I completed my BS in and (concurrently enrolled) MS in Computer Science at Stanford and was involved in my school’s management consulting club. As an underclassmen I’d interned a few times at a few buy-side finance firms and for my junior summer, I was a PM intern at Microsoft where I worked on personalized recommendations within Xbox’s Game Pass. I loved my summer at Microsoft, but I was interested in APM opportunities given the unique social experience where there are a lot of company-organized social events (and even some travel opportunities) for the cohort.
The Lyft APM Interview Process
Take-home Challenge
Interview 1: Product Sense Interview (30 mins)
Interview 2: Execution (Analytics) Interview (30 mins)
Final round Interviews:
Product Sense (45 mins)
Execution (45 mins)
Leadership (45 mins)
Advice for the take-home challenge
Lyft’s take-home requires you to create a product recommendation to solve a user or business problem. You’re required to submit a written document between 1-4 pages and are advised to focus primarily on showing your thought process around problem exploration and weighing up potential solutions. Although Lyft wants to see some discussion of the steps you’d take for execution, they don’t advise that you spend time on high-fidelity mocks or a fully-fleshed solution.
Before I started tackling the take-home challenge, I tried to understand Lyft’s core strategy and current market position. First, I read through the business section of Lyft’s latest public filings and listened to their recent earnings calls. For the latest public filings, I always read through the latest 10-K and 10-Q.
A 10-K is a comprehensive report filed annually by a publicly-traded company about its financial performance and is required by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). An 10-Q is similar except it must be filed at the end of each of the first three fiscal quarters instead of being filed annually. 10-K filings tend to provide a better overview of the business (under Part I of the report) and supplementing this reading, the latest 10-Q can help give more recent insights of the company’s position (especially if the last 10-K was filed quite a while ago). All these public reports can be found on the SEC’s official website.
Reading through these resources, I would note down any major questions that came up as I was reading through: “Why did Lyft sell their autonomous division?” “Why are they pursuing a partnership strategy with autonomous instead and what’s the end goal?” These questions guided my next stage of research as I moved onto browsing through recent press releases, news coverage, and presentations given by leadership.
When it came to completing the take-home assignment, I personally chose to follow the vague outline of a traditional product requirements document. I found this incredibly helpful as writing a PRD leads you through the steps of describing the problem space, outlining your objectives and success metrics, using these metrics to discuss and weighing up different solutions, and finally, explaining how to execute your chosen feature. This helps ensure you construct a cohesive argument as to how you arrived at your final recommended solution.
The take-home is designed to understand how you think about problems and it’s essential you communicate your argument clearly and concisely. If you haven’t written a PRD before but want to try and see if the following structure of one might be helpful, there are lots of templates online you can follow.
Product Interview Advice
To prepare for product design interviews, you should aim to deeply understand two or three user groups you’re interested in discussing. Pick broad user groups that could be relevant to an array of prompts (e.g. children, elderly people). This will help you avoid a common pitfall interviewees face when approaching these questions where they pick a user group they only have a superficial understanding of and are likely to overgeneralize their habits and user challenges.
One source I found particularly helpful was Children’s UX: Usability Issues in Designing for Young People published by Nielsen Norman Group. An example of a useful takeaway from this study is that you need to target very narrow age groups when designing for children. At the very least, you should distinguish between young (3-5), mid-range (6-8), and older (9-12) children because each group has significantly different behaviors, physical and cognitive behaviors. One example of this is that children aged 4 have an attention span of around 8-12 minutes whereas by age 12 that increases to around 24-36 minutes. Furthermore, the study also concludes that children are acutely aware of age differences and these young users react negatively to content designed for children that were even one grade below or above their own level.
To see how this can be applied in an interview, let’s consider the hypothetical question “Design Lyft for a currently underserved population.” Armed with this knowledge, when you’re brainstorming user groups you could state “children aged 9-12” as a potential group to target. Then, when brainstorming potential challenges this user faces, you’ll be able to draw from empirically proven challenges such as “children find it frustrating to use apps that are designed for users much older than them.”
General Interview Advice: Your 2 minute pitch
Regardless of what type of interview it is, you’ll have to introduce yourself at the beginning of your interview. This is your first chance to impress your interviewer while giving them an insight into why you’re passionate about working for Lyft.
I highly recommend perfecting a self-introduction that goes over your academic background, your previous work experience, any relevant extracurricular experience, and how this has led you to apply to Lyft. Keep it short and snappy - as a rule of thumb, don’t let this be over 2 minutes. This step is particularly important if you have a less traditional background. For instance, if you studied economics and previously worked three internships in consulting or finance, this will help the interviewer understand how the skills you’ve learned in these other experiences can help you be an effective APM whilst helping them understand why you’ve chosen to make the pivot.
For example:
“I’m Helen, a rising senior at Stanford doing my BS and MS in Computer Science. During my time at Stanford, I’ve interned in VC, public and private equity roles focused on tech investing and found it a really rewarding experience to work at the intersection of tech and strategy. However, I realized that I was more interested in working not only through not only strategy from a high level, but also being involved in the process of bringing the new strategies and products to life. Hence, for junior summer I interned at Microsoft where I worked on improving personalized recommendations for Game Pass, a gaming subscription platform within Xbox. For full time, I’d love to continue working in product within a less mature market focused on… ”
Aspects about Lyft’s Recruitment process that stood out to me:
Lyft’s HR is incredibly responsive
The most dreaded part of any interview process is not being sure how long it’s going to be before you hear back about your interview (i.e. getting ghosted by HR). Lyft’s HR was incredibly proactive and sent emails after every interview about when we were going to hear back about the next stage. They also gave us clear indications about the overarching timeline for when we’d hear back about final results so that we knew early in the process whether we could complete the interviews in time for our other offer deadlines.
Also, Lyft’s HR responded incredibly quickly. Every time I had a question about the interview process, they would always get back to me within a few hours. I also dealt with some urgent unexpected interruptions right before my final round interviews and Lyft HR helped reschedule my interviews last minute and worked around my availability. Of all the recruiting processes I’ve gone through, this was the best HR I’ve interacted with. The HR team that deals with APM recruiting works closely with organizing the APM program (from team matching to organizing social activities) so this was a huge green flag for me.Lyft organized individual calls with current APMs before our final round interviews
Every interviewee had a chance to schedule a 15 minute call with a current APM before their final round interviews. The APMs were encouraged to be transparent and interviewees were told we could ask any advice we wanted as this wouldn’t be discussed in deliberations. I really appreciated this as it helped level the playing field a bit for all the candidates. Seeing as not all candidates will necessarily know a current APM, it helped ensure that everyone at least had a chance to ask an APM any burning advice-related questions they had.
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