Metrics question
How do you know there are enough drivers for the number of deliveries at any given time and area?
- Lyft
- Metrics
- Medium
Practice this question out loud. An AI interviewer asks it, follows up like a real interviewer would, and scores your answer. Type or speak.
Start a mock interview on this question · Mock interview from a job description
What this question tests
Tests marketplace supply-demand balancing metrics for a real-time logistics platform.
How to approach it
- Frame this as a liquidity question, drivers versus delivery requests, sliced by time and geography.
- Set the core metric as driver utilization rate, active delivery time over online time, tracked by zone and hour.
- Add unfulfilled or expired delivery request rate and average time-to-match as complementary metrics.
- Use zone- and 15-30 minute-level granularity, since city-wide averages hide local imbalance.
- Trigger surge pricing or driver incentives when time-to-match or unfulfilled-request rate crosses a threshold in a zone.
What a strong answer includes
- Names concrete metrics, utilization rate, time-to-match, unfulfilled rate, instead of a vague enough-drivers answer.
- Insists on zone and time-of-day granularity since city-wide averages mask local shortages.
- Ties the metric threshold to an actionable lever, incentives or surge, rather than leaving it abstract.
Common mistakes
- Using a single city-wide driver count as the answer, ignoring time-of-day and micro-geography.
- Not connecting the metric to an actionable response.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you set the threshold that triggers a surge or incentive?
- How would you forecast demand ahead of time rather than just reacting to it?
More metrics questions
- Late deliveries lead to customer churn. What data we should look at to prove this hypothesis for a food delivery app?PayPal · Metrics · Medium
- How would reduce cancellations for Uber?Shopify · Metrics · Medium
- There is a data point that indicates that there are more Uber drop-offs at the airport than pick-ups from the airport. Why is this the case and what would you do within the product to change that?PayPal · Metrics · Hard
- How would you measure the success of Uber Ride?Lyft · Metrics · Easy
- If a large number of drivers are dropping out of a particular city, why would it be?Lyft · Metrics · Medium
- Drivers are dropping out of a city on Lyft. How do you figure out what's going on?PayPal · Metrics · Medium
More questions from Lyft
Learn the skill behind it
Chapters of the AI PM course that teach what this question tests.
- Chapter 9: Prove it paid off: outcomes, economics, and pricing
- Chapter 2: Data fluency: SQL, logs, and reading the truth yourself
- Chapter 14: Get the job: the AI PM interview loop