Serious post. I have gone through all old posts I could find. Need some fresh perspective. Hope you can help me here. I have competitive offers from both with Lyft leading by a margin. Offer is no longer the deciding factor for me. 1. Which company has long term growth prospects for a PM in the infra side? 2. Better work life balance. Pre ipo, so I don't expect to rest, but hope not to be pulling 50-60hr/w regularly. Former Uber employees said that the tech stack was a mess in 2017. How is it now? How about Lyft?
Answer these simple questions and find out yourself. 1) Do you like coping or innovating? 2) Bing or Google? 3) Ride sharing or Mobility platform? 4) No IPO plans or well defined IPO strategy 5) No annual refreshers vs good annual refreshers 6) Lyft credit vs Uber credits (yes, you can buy food with it's through ubereats) 7) US centric vs global I think it's a simple choice overall but you need to do your own research about the team and see which one you like the most. Clearly with Infra Uber needs a lot more work to support these massive businesses like Rides, Eats, Frieght, ATG, Jump etc Work life balance is team dependent.
Why is ATG bad for PM?
For PM role, the clear winner is Uber. At Lyft you’re going to be following so it’s not a good place to be career-wise. At Uber we also have an impressive tech stack for helping PMs test hypotheses and run experiments that is without parallel in industry. Regarding tech stack being a mess, it’s fine on infra now. Marketplace is hit and miss, but there are a bunch of engineers there now dedicated to refactoring it and architecting solutions to handle the next 5+ years of growth for all businesses (ridesharing, eats, freight, elevate etc. The tech stack at Lyft is a mess too according to several comments I’ve seen from Lyft engineers too. Lyft’s product lead, Tali, is almost universally reviled. You should also read this article that digs into Lyft’s product culture: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/how-lyfts-missteps-killed-its-chances-of-overtaking-uber
Agree with your general perspective but when it comes to experimentation we are not even close to the level of infra at FB (have worked at both )
TBH both companies are mediocre.
Why leave FB? Lyft is great for PM if you land on the right team. Great WLB vs Uber based on what I’ve heard from friends there. What level are you?
Uber. Work life balance would be much better at Uber compared to Lyft based on my understanding. And there are a lot more challenging problems to solve based on the breadth of the products that we have.
Lyft has more financial upside. Uber’s much higher valuation more than captures their market share lead
This is such mediocre level of investment thinking. By that logic, any smaller company has a better upside than bigger ones. The amount of different verticals/markets that Uber has a stake in makes it a far better and more diversified investment than Lyft — which no offense intended — still seems like a one trick pony. It blows my mind why you all did not expand internationally given all the Uber PR last year.
And my claim is that all of that is captured in your valuation
I interviewed at both and the cultures seem very distinct. Uber’s scale appealed to me, given my particular focus. I’ve not been disappointed by the growth and momentum. There’s lot of energy, and some feeling of a new and common cause (Uber 2.0), under a great public company CEO. It’s the defining company of its generation; so why not be part of the story while you still can? Lyft is great if you can own a big piece of the product.
I'm on infra. The tech stack is much much better than it was last year. Things are much more platform based or on a roadmap to be platformized. Personally I think Uber has the most opportunity for a PM. The scale and the different industries we're in pose a lot of interesting problems