Lyft engineering VP Peter Morelli to speak at Mobile Summit about building bigger, faster on mobile

Since Peter Morelli joined ride-hailing company Lyft a year ago to lead its engineering efforts, the company has faced continued tough competition from Uber, the bigger player in the space.

Lyft has raised more than $2 billion from investors like General Motors and Rakuten, and while Uber has raised much more and has many more drivers, Lyft has managed to keep parity in key markets on details like price and wait time. Lyft has also struck key partnerships to help it scale.

There are even a few areas where Lyft is attempting to pull ahead. One of these is the ability to push out feature updates quickly — for example, rewriting its entire iOS app on Swift to make the app easier to maintain.

We’re delighted to announce that Peter Morelli, VP of engineering at Lyft, will be speaking at our executive-level Mobile Summit in Sausalito, Ca on April 4-5. He’ll be talking about what it takes to build faster, better mobile products at a time when customers are expecting such snappy service.

Above: Kleiner Perkins partner John Maeda will moderate

He’ll address things like how to structure an engineering team to move faster, how to build an intuitive UI, and how to manage an app’s performance while responding to the massive amounts of data it collects. For a service like Lyft, routing drivers to the right places is a complex task, especially as it upgrades its ride-sharing service Lyft Line, which connects passengers who are traveling similar routes.

The engineering challenge comes just as Morelli is furiously building out his engineering team. When he arrived at Lyft last year, he was tasked with doubling the engineering team within about nine months. Fortunately, Morelli brings significant scaling experience to the table, having previously helped build out Twitter’s engineering team.

He’ll be speaking on stage with John Maeda, a partner at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins and an expert in design, with a background as an MIT-trained engineer.

Learn more about fast-growth mobile strategies at the Summit, where our boardroom sessions offer smart exchanges between senior marketers and product and engineering executives. Other speakers at this year’s Mobile Summit include leading executives from Google, Amazon, Pinterest, Runtastic, Pandora, GrubHub, LinkedIn, Zynga, Pocket Gems, Touch of Modern, and AOL. And there’s a surprise guest we can’t talk about just yet.

We invite only 180 executives to the Summit (you can apply to attend here). It’s designed to be an intimate experience where top people in the field exchange strategies around some of the hottest trends in mobile — at a time when brands are having to move quickly to embrace instantaneous distribution. The goal is to make the Summit the best insider event, which is why it’s also free of influence from specific vendors or platform owners.

Leading vendors will be there, of course, but we prioritize brands and other independent app owners to create the best mix possible.

Working sessions go into depth on specific topic areas, and cocktail receptions make sure the networking juices flow.

Topics include the following:

• User acquisition
• Designing the user experience
• Messaging and video
• Mobile marketing automation
• Targeted marketing
• How to build your mobile marketing team
• How to orient an entire organization around mobile
• M-commerce and online-offline convergence
• Nurturing existing users
• Harnessing data for mobile engagement
• Mobile advertising attribution
• Predicting and measuring