Senior Product Designer / Associate Product Manager（Hybrid – Design Focus）
This project reframed roommate search from a listing-driven problem into a trust-first matching experience, balancing user safety, behavioral intent, and realistic business impact.
Roommate is a matching experience designed to help users find compatible roommates through lifestyle signals, verification, and profile-driven discovery. Instead of treating roommate search like traditional rental listings, the work focused on where trust breaks down, how much friction users tolerate, and what a viable version of this product should realistically optimize for.
Over a 12-month cross-functional initiative, I owned the end-to-end experience—from research synthesis and UX strategy to interaction design, final UI, and product-level decisions—working closely with Product and Engineering to define scope, success metrics, and long-term trade-offs.
12 stakeholders, 8 engineers, 2 QA, 1 project manager, 1 product manager, 1 junior designer, and oversight from the General Manager.
This scale required balancing competing priorities across engineering complexity, moderation capacity, and business risk.
Hybrid role: Senoir Product Designer + Associate Product Manager
I was responsible for defining the problem space, experience principles, and trade-offs across user trust, conversion, and monetization.
Research focused less on validating demand and more on understanding constraints—who the reachable users were, what trust meant in this context, and how much friction the experience could realistically sustain.
By combining qualitative interviews, competitive analysis, and live behavioral data, we reframed the problem from “Should we build roommate matching?” to “How much of this experience is worth building, and for whom?” These insights directly informed scope decisions, UX strategy, and monetization assumptions throughout the project.
Focused on how competitors balance trust, access, and monetization in high-risk matching environments.
Explored how users initiate roommate search, evaluate compatibility, and decide when to trust.
With 15% of users actively searching for a roommate, 75% open to using the platform for matching, and roughly 70% accessing the experience on mobile, the effective reachable audience was estimated at approximately 8%—representing a meaningful but constrained opportunity shaped by user intent and device limitations.
Users perceive outdated sites as unsafe and prefer to communicate via in‑app messaging, only sharing personal contact details after rapport is established. Competitors position messaging as a core feature and often gate it behind a paywall or verification step. Services like ID verification, social media linking and background checks help build trust and differentiate offerings.