DeveloperWeek 2020

When our product owner announced their departure earlier last year, our team had to answer tough questions. What would we do without a PM? How would we prioritize our growth goals against an ever-changing sea of company priorities? Who would manage stakeholders and priorities in a company as fast-moving as Lyft? The answer came surprisingly: no replacement was to be hired; instead the team would own its product direction!

Join usas we discover how shifting product ownership to the engineering team led to a revitalization of our mandate as product growth engineers. We'll discuss how the team utilized bottom-up rapid experimentation and a learning mindset to validate opportunities for the business. Together, the team developed skills in the ever-mystical art of relationship-building to communicate and influence effectively across the organization. And finally - gulp - the team continuously reported OKR progress in front of senior product leadership, celebrating wins and owning up to shortcomings.

Product ownership is both freeing and frightening, but learning to take it on is crucial to developing business-aligned, purposeful engineers. Whether or not you have a product owner, we will emerge with strategies for increasing engagement, ownership and product-mindedness on your engineering teams!