Company Context
Rentable is a rental marketplace that helps renters discover apartments, compare listings, and connect with property managers. The company competes on listing quality, search experience, and lead conversion, and relies on strong coordination between product, engineering, and go-to-market teams to improve both renter satisfaction and marketplace performance.
Problem
You are an Engineering Manager at Rentable supporting the renter-facing experience across surfaces like Rentable Search, listing detail pages, saved searches, and lead submission flows. Over the last two quarters, engineering throughput has improved, but customer-facing outcomes have not kept pace. Teams are shipping infrastructure upgrades, partner integrations, and internal tooling, yet renter complaints about inaccurate listings, slow page loads, and low-quality lead experiences remain high.
Recent signals show the tension clearly:
- Search-to-lead conversion has been flat at 3.8% for 6 months
- Listing detail page bounce rate has increased from 34% to 39%
- Median mobile page load time on key renter journeys is 3.9 seconds, above the internal target of 2.5 seconds
- Support tickets related to outdated availability and pricing are up 22% quarter over quarter
- Engineering capacity is constrained: only 2 squads can take on major roadmap changes this half
Deliverables
- Explain how you would ensure engineering work stays aligned with the renter experience across Rentable's core user journey.
- Identify the most important renter segments or jobs-to-be-done to prioritize first, and justify why.
- Propose a framework for deciding which engineering investments should be prioritized: customer-facing features, quality improvements, platform work, or partner/data reliability.
- Define how you would measure whether engineering work is improving customer experience, not just shipping output.
- Describe key trade-offs you would make if stakeholder requests conflict with renter needs or technical constraints.
Constraints
- You must show measurable customer impact within 2 quarters.
- Rentable cannot pause all platform or partner work; some non-customer-facing investments are required.
- Property manager data quality is partially outside Rentable's direct control.
- Headcount is fixed for the planning cycle, and major re-platforming is off the table.
