tldr: Owned product design, full-stack dev, & management; growing a student housing platform to 2.2K+ active users and expanding to 5+ universities.

Note that this is in progress! Pictures coming soon.

intro

Throughout the 2024–2025 school year, I served as Product Manager for Bunkmate, Rice’s first and only student housing platform! I led 2 tech leads, 8 developers, and a designer — all while contributing directly across product, design, and engineering.

I took part in every layer: setting strategy, designing wireframes and experiences alongside the designer, and coding features with devs to bring them to life. For a while, all I thought about was Bunkmate, and I LOVED it: owning the product end-to-end, driving the vision, and building it while managing an incredibly talented team.

⭐ So, in less than 6 months post-release, Bunkmate has:

📌 2.2K+ monthly active users across 700+ registered accounts
📌 100+ housing posts and 47K+ in-app engagements
📌 Iterating and planned expansion to 5+ universities!

And we're still iterating!

the problem

To put it succinctly, there was no centralized, organized platform for students to share and look for housing. Instead, Rice, like many other universities, had a very unfortunate platform as means of finding housing: GroupMe.

Our preliminary research confirmed this — when asked about which platforms students currently used to find housing, GroupMe and word of mouth were the most popular options by far. However, when we asked why students used those channels, the answers were simply: “because everyone else is” or “there’s no other option.”

Not only is GroupMe already hard to use (messages get buried, formatting is nonexistent, scams are common, and the app is glitchy…), but Rice didn’t even have a dedicated housing group. Instead, all housing posts were randomly sent into “Rice Students Selling Stuff” — a groupchat filled with everything from selling concert tickets to secondhand clothes to “I lost my student ID! Plz help”

Fun fact - this process was so flawed that I was genuinely almost homeless my junior year! :D

So, housing search was very fragmented; Rice was desperately in need of a centralized housing platform.

product statement & vision

We had an ambitious goal: make finding and posting housing at Rice even easier than booking on Airbnb. Imagine every student simply logging onto a site, searching for their ideal place or posting their listing, and... done.

The Mission:

To simplify off-campus housing for Rice students (and beyond) by creating a centralized, easy-to-use platform that connects roommates, subleasers, and potential tenants in one place.

product management

To preface my design and development work, I want to emphasize my role as Product Manager — I directed the end-to-end product lifecycle, focusing on vision, strategy, and execution!

The first thing I and my leadership team did was map out the MVP. Both before and after collecting insights from 120+ student surveys, I worked closely with our tech leads (Gabriel Ong and Sathya Padmanabhan, Bunkmate's two amazing TLs!) to prioritize the core pain points students cared most about — stripping the feature set down to only what was essential for launch! I now recognize that this is one of the most important duties of being a PM, but more on this in the last section.

From there, I conducted competitive analysis — looking at Airbnb, Vrbo, Uber, and Pinterest. These platforms became benchmarks for usability and trust before jumping head first in the design with Faith (more on this in the next section!).

On the execution side, I organized all the sprint schedules, standups, and design reviews for 2 tech leads, 8 developers, and 1 designer. I believe one of the hardest part of being in this club with a small team was keeping people motivated and genuinely wanting to come and finish these products! I had to plan out my schedule and structure the team very well to keep the team aligned while giving me visibility to unblock roadblocks as they came up.

All of this planning also meant that I also led the timing and rollout strategy! Because survey data showed housing demand spiked in Spring and Fall, I deliberately made sure to launch during the Spring peak and paired rollout with campus-wide marketing! After launch, I tracked engagement metrics and ran feedback loops to guide our next wave of features and expansion plans… which was where I got the stats above!

Now that I have cleared up my roles a product manager, let me dive deeper into how I built with my team: in both design and development.

design process

Throughout every iteration, I worked directly with the amazing Faith Chen, our designer! Design was very much an us effort, and we synced very often at every stage of the process — doing preliminary research, conducting user research, iterating from lofis to hifis, and doing a second round of user research.

I will be going over our design thinking process, but Faith's portfolio goes over the work we do in more depth (quite beautifully): https://faith-chen.com/design/bunkmate!

preliminary user research & ideations

After communicating the product vision to Faith, we went straight into user research: what are the pain points of the users, and what are the best possible solutions? We conducted the survey with two guiding questions:

• When do students typically need off campus housing? -> Assists with product timeline

• How are students currently looking for off campus housing -> How we can structure Bunkmate/prioritize features!

Now, after sending out surveys and a few 1-1 interviews — resulting in around 120 responses — we found the following insights:

1. 💔 Housing discovery is fragmented across GroupMe and word of mouth. Pain points include unclear discovery, credibility concerns, and limited options.

   A pain point! Now we know our product solves a real problem…

   
   

2. ⭐️ Students prioritize availability, price, and proximity to Rice.

   These three features were immediately added to our MVP. Availability, price, and proximity to Rice are now the first few details that show up within a listing.

   
   

3. 💻 Most browse on desktop, preferring map + grid views with clear photos, per-person pricing, and distance markers.

   For MVP, we now knew that we should prioritize desktop views with clear photos. Map views and distance markers were later added to the post-MVP website… which is now implemented!

   
   

4. 📆 Demand peaks around Fall and Spring with a notable Summer sublet wave.

   I changed the timeline immediately after reading this, making sure that our product would launch right at the Spring peak and to make sure the website was up and running over the summer.

ideations & lofis

After narrowing down the MVP and gathering all the user research, we moved onto the user flow and the low fidelity wireframes!

We wrote down notes, drew sketches, and split up lofis of the home, listings, posting, and profile pages — all of which were done with intentional user design, doing user research and AB testing on our own devs as we iterated.

… to hifis!

I then continued to go on to create hifis with Faith, bringing these hifis to life with multiple iterations and intentional design choices.

There's many more iterations to go! The beauty of design is that there's always something to improve on, and we can always improve the user experience more.

development process

On the development side, we brought these designs to life with TypeScript, React.js, Next.js, and Supabase! I contributed both as a PM and a developer, working alongside the team to ship core features. I'd also like to note that being so involved in both sides of the product made it so much easier for me communicate and execute my vision — I could do so visually, implement it myself, and be able to recognize at a glance when even the tiniest things were wrong. I was super strict on product quality.

We implemented (yes, there's a lot!):

• 🔐 authentication & user creation — i.e. only Rice students or faculty can access our page

• 🖼️ optimizing image uploads & compression to best display listings!

• 🎚️ priority filtering (distance, price, lease duration, bed/bath) for relevance-based search

• 🔎 we later implemented an even more advanced filter search!

• 📝 listing editor & profile pages with editable user info and current listings

• ⭐ favorites & digest emails, letting users save listings and receive updates on archived ones

• 🗺️ map integration with Google Maps + Supabase geocoding for location-based search

• 📱 and, of course, responsive grid-based home & listing cards, with an archive function and FAQ/About pages

We designed the database schema in Supabase to support listings, users, favorites, and filtering at scale, refining it iteratively as features expanded!

If you want to see the code yourself, everyone is on our open-source GitHub: https://github.com/rice-apps/bunkmate-but-better

bunkmate's future

My vision is to expand the platform nationwide… and the goal right now is to get at least 5 university expansions by next year! We've already run informal user research with students from Stanford, Georgia Tech, Michigan, USC… and the pain points are universal. After dogfooding Bunkmate at Rice and watching it succeed, Bunkmate has the potential to scale and truly solve housing problems across campuses nationwide.

As my tech lead, Sathya, put it: a product is never perfect… there's so many ways we can make Bunkmate even better. So, on top of ambitiously growing Bunkmate nationwide, we've already been thinking of new features (sublease alerts and notifications, analytics for listers, even more advanced filtering, smart/automatic photo tagging, a model to detect fraud and scams…). This is also a world where AI keeps growing, which means that I'm planning to incorporate and prioritize AI-centered features and tools (I've been very much eyeing Figma Make!).

And, above all, I want to make sure Bunkmate stays a high-quality project. As an open source initiative, we’re actively improving our codebase so it’s scalable and maintainable!

product & personal reflections

Working on Bunkmate has been one of the most fulfilling experiences of my college career, and it genuinely is one of the achievements I'm most proud of. I do not mean that lightly. This product and team gave me the chance to be a PM, designer, and developer all at once — identifying a real student pain point, scoping an MVP, shipping it, and then iterating with real usage at Rice. Seeing students actively use the product we built has been incredibly rewarding and I want to continue this forever.

I've dived head first into everything product with this initiative: all the way from design thinking to leadership to technical ownership. Working across product, design, and engineering taught me how to balance tradeoffs, make fast decisions, and, above all, always, always, ALWAYS keep the user at the center. I still have much to learn… but that's what makes this so exciting!

In short, Bunkmate is my baby — I’m so incredibly attached to the product, the vision, and the wonderful, amazing team that made it real.