Building the product and design function at an early-stage PropTech startup

Yuhu offered comprehensive operational software for property operators in the multifamily space. I joined after the seed round as Head of Product and Design, with a mandate to build the product and design function and get the company ready to scale. I also served as a voting member of the board of directors.

The company had strong early customers, including the two largest property managers in Canada, but a lot of foundational work needed to happen before we could build confidently. I introduced SCRUM and product pods to bring structure to how we worked, and spent significant time ensuring fixes and enhancements stabilized the existing platform to make it more reliable.

I recognized two foundational areas that required attention: the lack of a strong brand and the absence of a design system. Once established, I was confident that both would improve efficiency and consistency in marketing and design/engineering respectively

The brand work was one of the more comprehensive undertakings. Yuhu needed a strong, differentiated presence in a crowded market. We built a complete identity from the ground up: visual language, tone of voice, photography direction, and iconography. The standout was a series of paper sculpture illustrations commissioned from Mililitros, a studio whose work gave Yuhu something genuinely distinctive, warm, and unlike anything else in the PropTech space. The brand permeated everything we did subsequently, including our resident app, detailed below.

Alongside the brand guidelines, we built a design system using Ant Design as its backbone. The goal was to close the gap between design and development — a shared component library that gave the team a consistent visual language and faster execution. Rather than rebuilding common patterns from scratch on every project, designers and engineers were working from the same foundation. That system touched everything we shipped afterward, including the marketing website, sales decks, and the resident app.

The YuhUI design brought consistent and efficiency to Yuhu's designers and developers.

A series of unqiue paper scultpures were commissioned - a key apsect of Yuhu's friendly and approachable brand.

On the product side, two areas got the most attention.

The first was a new leasing product, built to fulfill a commitment to customers with revenue tied to it. We involved Canada's two largest property operators heavily in research and design phases which helped us better understand where Yuhu's exisitng solution fell short and gave us deep insight into all aspects of leasing workflows. The finsished product allows customers to design their own leasign workflows, supports multiple propery management solutions, and ensures that leasing offices, and literally accelerated time-to-lease from days to hours.

The second was Resident Mobile, Yuhu's first native iOS and Android app. The project was already underway with an outside vendor when I arrived. The quality wasn't there, so we made the decision to change partners and start fresh. The app covered maintenance requests, rent payments and auto-pay, amenity booking, messaging with the property team, building notices, event RSVPs, and renters insurance. We restructured a number of flows from the previous attempt to reduce steps and improve how requests connected to the conversations around them. It reached over 160,000 units with 80% adoption, over 60% of residents used it for payments, and it won Best New Product at the Canadian Federation of Apartment Associations.

HappyCo acquired Yuhu in 2022. I stayed on as Director of Product Design.

The resident mobile app allowed users to easily manage all aspects of their homes.