Rhino's product philosophy, ft. Mei Lui

At Rhino, our goal is to create best-in-class products that modernize the rental experience for property owners and renters, making renting more frictionless and accessible.

Working on the Product team here is one of the most exciting and challenging experiences a product manager or product designer can have; we don’t have just a singular product with isolated user segments. Instead, we have an ecosystem of products that need to work together seamlessly and balance the needs of renters, property owners, insurance partners, and our internal teams.

Every opportunity or problem we come across has extra complexity because they have to be evaluated through these four different lenses.

So, how do we navigate this complexity and ensure we create products that both resonate with our users and make sense for our business?

First, we build and continually refine product development processes that center our users and their needs.

We are always looking to learn more about our users. This includes, but is not limited to:

1. Getting on calls with property managers to source their feedback directly

2. Working with Customer Support leadership to understand what questions or issues renters reach out to them with

3. Listening to Sales calls

4. Running large-scale user research initiatives with our third party research vendors

5. And partnering with our Risk and Compliance teams to understand the nuances of the insurance landscape and changing requirements of our insurance partners

Second, we align on the business outcomes that are going to support the growth and health of Rhino. Then, we meticulously break these outcomes down into opportunities to solve customer problems.

This is the fun part – it’s where we take everything we have learned from our users, internal and external, and turn those into new product ideas, new features, or experiments. (Usually after many days of digital whiteboarding, debating, and even disagreeing.)

For example, in 2022, we set a business goal to accelerate our growth by doubling the amount of renters being invited to Rhino each month. There were many ways we could have achieved this, but the clearest opportunity was one that also solved a major pain point for our Revenue teams and property management partners – reducing weeks-long SLAs for integration onboarding and setup to mere days.

We heavily invested in upgrading our integration platform and can now onboard properties with tens of thousands of units in just 2 days, which contributed to consistently overdelivering on our growth goal!

Lastly, we keep setting the bar higher for ourselves, so that we continue improving.

Members of the Product team embody being ego-free, which means we stay unmarried to our products and are always asking ourselves how the product can serve more users without sacrificing quality and technical excellence. We don’t shy away from complaints and criticisms – in fact, we love diving into those, because we know that is where the meatiest opportunities can be found.

The number of renters and property managers that utilize Rhino and insurance partners we work with has grown exponentially over the years. I am so immensely proud of the work that our brilliant and passionate Product team has done to contribute to that growth. I am honored to be a Product leader here at Rhino and excited to keep delivering high quality products and user experiences in 2023 and beyond.

Mei Lui

Mei Lui is the Senior Director of Product at Rhino.