Completed the Lyft product designer loop a few weeks ago. Staff-level (their equivalent), coming from a consulting background. Wanted to write something that goes beyond "they want a portfolio with process" because every design interview wants that and it doesn't help you prep.
The Lyft design loop is interesting because their product touches a really wide range of experience types: the rider app, the driver app (which has meaningfully different UX needs), the web booking experience, and internal tooling for ops. The team you interview with may have a different emphasis, so try to figure out the team from your recruiter before the loop starts.
The portfolio presentation:
This was 45 minutes, me presenting 2 cases with 15 minutes of Q&A after each. They said to pick your most impactful and most complex work. What they actually mean: pick work where you can talk specifically about decisions you made, constraints you navigated, and how you measured whether the design worked. The "how do you know it worked" question will come up. Have an answer that isn't just "the PM told me users liked it."
I presented a consumer checkout redesign and an internal dashboard project. The internal one got more interesting questions. They liked that I talked about the trade-offs between what data science wanted to show vs. what ops agents could actually act on.
Design critique round:
They put the Lyft app (rider flow) in front of me and asked me to critique a specific part of the trip-in-progress experience. This is standard design interview territory but Lyft does it well -- they're genuinely curious about your opinion, not looking for one right answer. I talked about: information hierarchy during a trip (what matters most to a rider in the 3-minute window before pickup), how real-time ETA uncertainty could be communicated without creating anxiety, and a question about the notification architecture that I admitted I didn't know the technical constraints on. That last one was fine -- they seemed to like that I flagged the unknown rather than speculating.
Problem-solving round:
"Design a feature to help frequent Lyft riders know when to request their ride to make their flight." Basically a flight-catch assistant. Open-ended. I spent 5 minutes on scope before going into concepts. They wanted to see: how do you deal with ambiguity, how do you think about edge cases (what if the rider has checked bags? what if the gate changes?), what would you test first.
Behavioral:
Focused on collaboration and working through disagreement. One question was about a time I had to tell a PM that a requested feature was solving the wrong problem. Have a specific, non-scorched-earth version of this story.
Comp for staff design was competitive -- recruiter mentioned the total package would be in the $270-$320k range depending on leveling, with RSU refresh after year one. I ended up not accepting (took something else) but the process was genuinely good.