Quitting and Being Replaced by Three Senior Managers

I had a pretty good run at Lyft in two and a half years between 2016 and 2018. I made a ton of friends, won an award (one of the inflection points of my career), and got promoted and the biggest raise possible…. which still wasn’t enough.

For the majority, of that time I was (de facto, then officially) Head of Hub Operations, where I directly managed processes, culture, training, tools and analytics for all our retail operations around the company (comprising some 200 sites, and nearly a thousand people).

Some of the things I did included:

Retail experience: I was responsible for the service experience in “Retail Ops”. This started with Hubs, and the culture of service that we had, that we conveyed to staff through a rich training curriculum that evolved over the time I was there.

Retail experience expanded to our other retail fronts – Express Drive and Onboarding — since the people and tools overlapped, and in Hubs we had the best tools, metrics, culture and processes.

Retail technology and tools: I personally built the first version of a processing engine for every single visit to Hubs. It started with one location, and just a few hundred visitors a day…

It ended up being ten thousand visitors a day, all going through my server. It connected many disparate platforms to create a rich data and management system.

Workplace productivity: On the back of the retail technology and tools, I established the first metrics for workplace productivity, and started benchmarking sites against each other.

We measured “tickets per agent per hour” using a complex array of logic, and it was the baseline for getting the most out of our employees.

So what happened? When I gave notice in August 2018, I gave an almost unheard-of three months notice. The tendency in the US is to give two weeks notice; legally, no notice at all is required.

No recruitment happened while I was still there — partly due to a re-organisation, but also partly because it’s hard to replace one person who does so many things.

I noticed these job postings shortly after I left. These are my jobs, but in three people!

The first one (workplace productivity) probably encompassed more than just my job, but it was nice to know that I had laid the foundation with our rich data systems.