Tinder’s new feature “Swipe Night” is a textbook example of how to innovate an existing product with new and exciting content, that enriches the core experience of the product instead of harming it. At the Digitale Leute Summit, Senior Engineer Serve Vartanov explains, how the idea for Swipe Night was created and executed in a ridiculously short amount of time.
From Ideation to Market in a Matter of Months
With 30+ billion matches in 190 countries, Tinder is the world’s most popular app for meeting new people. As the growing demographic of digital and social natives (Gen Z ages 18 to 25) now makes up over half of its members, Tinder created a cross-functional „Z-Team“ of product managers, engineers, designers and marketers who rapidly test and deploy new features focused on how Gen-Z experiences the platform.
In this fireside chat, Serge Vartanov, Senior Backend Engineer, discusses how the Z-Team tackles new challenges associated with launching features that have never been built before. Serge explains how the team builds and deploys new capabilities and delivers experiences native to how Tinder’s Gen-Z audience interacts. You will learn how the team has taken projects like Tinder U, Festival Mode, Swipe Off and Swipe Night from ideation to market in weeks to months. By breaking down ambitious dreams into concrete targets, Tinder is able to launch new capabilities to members around the world on a weekly cadence.
About Serge
Serge Vartanov is Senior Backend Engineer on the Tinder Z-Team, where he’s focused on how Gen Z users between the age of 18 to 23 experience dating in the context of their entire digital social lives. Before Tinder, Serge served as Chief Marketing Officer of AutoGravity. He led various teams to transform automotive retailing for millions of car buyers. Serge holds an MBA with distinction from Harvard University and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of California, Berkeley.