Grow a Diverse Workforce through Equitable Development

By Yuko Yamazaki a Senior Director of Engineering on Lyft’s Customer Platform Team & the Founder of Lyft’s Equitable Development Initiative (EDI). This writing represents Ms. Yamazaki’s opinion and experience in her personal capacity.

Lyft’s Tech Diversity

Over the last three years, Lyft has worked to support the growth of Underrepresented Groups (URG) in technical leadership roles. At Lyft, URG 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 URG community. Lyft has done this by developing and retaining URG 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 URG 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 URG communities ever since I became a director ten years ago.

Through hiring, I’ve increased URG 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 URG employees will not only get us a higher URG 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

Over the three years since the launch of EDI, as of December 2022, both the % of staff engineers and the % of engineering managers who are from the URG communities have increased consistently. The increase in promotion percentage and retention percentage for URG Lyft employees were the biggest contributors to these results. The impact has been consistent at all levels and particularly strong for the individual contributor (IC) track. Furthermore, we saw more than half of the Lyft’s Tech URG community leverage the program throughout the years.

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 URG 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 URG communities: Research shows that URG 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, URG members do not sign up on their own.
2. 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.
3. 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 our success:

1. Leverage people in tech with direct and personal experience: Do not move the problem to Human Resources to solve alone; 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 have volunteered in EDI each year to build, improve, and maintain EDI — including directors and VPs.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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 URG 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 URG 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, Manish Gupta, Ashwin Raj, Chris Lambert, Curtis Scott, and Kalpana Jogi — the sponsors who have invested in the program to launch and have 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 from across Lyft Tech.