GY

BuyAbility

Zillow · 2023–2026 · Invention and product leadership

A personalized view of what a buyer can afford, with real-time monthly payments for every home.

BuyAbilityiPhone screenshot · Zillow app · 1179×2556 · pending

The problem

In customer research, buyers kept telling us they didn't know what they could afford and didn't trust generic calculators. They wanted an answer before committing to pre-qualification. Zillow's core pages already had pre-qualification buttons, and growth from those placements was slowing.

I joined the Home Loans growth team with a mandate to get more of Zillow's audience to choose Zillow Home Loans. I proposed giving buyers a personalized affordability answer on every home they considered. I wanted to establish trust earlier and learn when they were ready for Home Loans.

What I owned

I invented BuyAbility, which gave buyers a personalized, real-time estimate of the home price and monthly payment that fit their budget. It also showed their likelihood of qualifying for a loan. Buyers saw a personalized monthly payment on every listing. I wrote and circulated the original opportunity brief across Zillow before we shipped.

I took the product from concept to launch in about 2.5 months to meet a fixed date for a national ad campaign. I wrote the requirements and told leadership that meeting the date required more people or less scope. We launched on May 13, 2024, iOS first, Android later that year.

I ran the product, enrollment funnel and calculation engine as a unified affordability program, first as Principal Product Manager, then as Senior Manager leading the product management team, until I moved to a Director role over Search in August 2026.

The decisions that mattered

Ship without full instrumentation

I deferred full product analytics to meet the campaign date. We kept business measurement through Zillow's experimentation platform and monitored latency, crashes and errors. I documented the scope cut, remaining measurements and rollback criteria in a pre-read for the launch decision. Leadership agreed to the plan, and we released in stages.

We stayed within the business-impact limit we'd agreed in advance. The team added full instrumentation about a month later.

Accept an additional click

Leadership wanted BuyAbility on the home details page, but we had no single decision owner and couldn't agree on a placement within the shopping team's design standards. I asked my team for concessions, asked shopping which exceptions its principles allowed, and brought both teams into shared working sessions. I also got senior product and design leaders to clarify how we'd make the decision.

We accepted a placement that required an additional click and preserved shopping's design standards. We shipped on the date, and enrollments rose substantially. My counterpart and I then agreed that my team would own the affordability components within those standards.

Protect downstream mortgage results

I tested replacing the listing page's pre-qualification button with "Can I afford this?" after agreeing on downstream mortgage stop conditions with the business. We set separate local and global thresholds. The test roughly doubled weekly BuyAbility enrollments, my goal metric, but crossed a downstream stop condition, so I reduced how many people saw it.

I took the result as evidence that buyers wanted an affordability answer before a bigger commitment. We pursued other placements and prefilled early enrollment inputs on web, increasing enrollment without harming downstream mortgage results.

Share ownership across Zillow

I wrote a strategy to expand BuyAbility and used the 2025 planning cycle to make affordability a company-level priority. Partner teams across search, the homepage, the listing page and AI funded and owned parts of the experience.

Teams also calculated affordability differently, so I proposed a central calculation service and became its product owner. Engineering built it, and we used it for BuyAbility, personalized payments and search filters.

Outcome

BuyAbility has over 5 million enrolled users. Personalized affordability became a company-level priority across Zillow's surfaces. When Zillow launched its app inside ChatGPT in October 2025, I led the affordability piece.

What I'd do differently

I would have prioritized product quality over lead-funnel growth a year earlier. We followed company growth priorities. People liked BuyAbility, but satisfaction and comprehension feedback stayed below where I wanted it.

In late 2025, I reviewed our own decisions and reset the strategy: improve accuracy, make the answers easier to understand, and modernize the experience before pursuing more funnel growth. We changed our investments and goals accordingly.

Public record