TenantBridge
Product Manager — MProduct, University of Michigan
Role
Product Manager
Timeline
Sep 2024 – Present
Context
MProduct, University of Michigan
Type
PM / Product Development
Problem
Prospective renters make major housing decisions without access to the most useful information available — what it's actually like to live there. Listings show photos and amenities; they don't tell you how the landlord handles maintenance, what the noise situation is like, or whether the building's heating actually works. Current tenants know all of this. They have no mechanism to share it.
Context
TenantBridge is a housing discovery app being built within MProduct, U of M's student PM organization. The concept: connect prospective renters directly with current tenants, so housing decisions are grounded in real experience rather than listing photos. MProduct runs like a real PM org — engineering teams, defined sprints, and an expectation that you ship something functional.
Why It Mattered
Most housing platforms are designed around landlord and property manager interests. Current tenants — the people with the most useful, unfiltered information — have no structured way to share it, and no incentive to do so on existing platforms. TenantBridge targets that information asymmetry directly. If it works, it gives renters a genuine information advantage in a market where they've historically had very little.
My Role
PM leading a 3-person team through the full product lifecycle — problem definition, user research program, MVP scoping, Figma prototyping, and roadmap communication. I also created the pitch deck used to present the product to MProduct leadership.
Constraints
Student engineering team with competing course schedules. Concept needed validation from scratch. No existing user base to recruit from for early research.
What I Did
Conducted 20+ user interviews across two user types — prospective renters and current tenants. Designed the full research program: screener criteria, discussion guides tailored to each user type, and a synthesis framework before running a single session.
The interviews surfaced a consistent pattern: prospective renters wanted candid, specific information — landlord responsiveness, noise levels, maintenance speed, hidden costs — that doesn't appear anywhere in a standard listing. Current tenants were willing to share this information if the mechanism was simple and low-friction.
Synthesized findings into product requirements and a prioritized MVP scope. Defined three core user stories: a current tenant posts a structured honest review; a prospective renter browses reviews by building or landlord; an interested renter can send a connection request to a reviewer. Everything else was cut.
Built high-fidelity Figma mockups to communicate the MVP experience concretely. Ran tradeoff sessions with the engineering team using the mockups as the anchor — made scope discussions specific rather than abstract. Created a pitch deck to present the roadmap and positioning to MProduct leadership.
Validated early solution concepts through follow-up sessions with research participants, iterating on feature scope and how we framed the product's value proposition.
Key Decisions & Tradeoffs
Decision 1
Decision 2
Decision 3
Outcome
20+ user interviews conducted with a structured, two-sided research protocol. MVP scope defined and validated through follow-up user feedback. High-fidelity Figma prototype and pitch deck delivered to MProduct leadership. Ongoing sprint delivery with the engineering team.
Reflection
“The hardest part of this project wasn't execution — it was maintaining clarity about what we were building and why when there were a dozen reasonable directions to go. The user interviews were the anchor every time scope discussions drifted. Having 20+ conversations documented and synthesized meant I could always point to what people actually said, not what I assumed they wanted.”