Tinder’s new CEO asked employees a simple question about success. Their answers exposed a bigger problem

When Spencer Rascoff became CEO of Match Group in February 2025, and CEO of Tinder in July of that year, he inherited a dating empire whose flagship app had spent more than a decade relying on the same formula that made it famous.

Tinder’s swipe-left, swipe-right experience had revolutionized online dating, but the company had struggled to keep pace with changing consumer expectations.

In 2024, Tinder’s paying user base declined 7% while revenue grew just 1%.

“In a lot of ways Tinder had lost product market fit with its users because it hadn’t innovated,” Rascoff told me recently .

The company, he acknowledged, had “rested on its laurels for a long time.” Rascoff, who previously led Zillow, set out to revive Tinder’s culture of innovation.

One of his first moves was to ask employees a deceptively simple question about what success looked like.

He recalls receiving blank stares.

Those who offered answers frequently pointed to quarterly profitability targets promised to Wall Street.

Even designers, product managers, and software engineers were measuring success against financial goals that offered little direction for improving the dating experience.

The disconnect exposed a fundamental management problem.

Tinder’s mission is to help people form connections, yet the employees building its product lacked a shared measure of whether they were delivering on that promise.

Rascoff introduced a companywide metric called “sparks,” which tracks conversations between matched users that reach at least six back-and-forth exchanges.

Tinder’s analysis of millions of messages suggested that conversations reaching that threshold were more likely to develop into flirting and plans to meet in person.

By focusing employees on sparks, Rascoff gave teams a measurable customer outcome to work toward, from improving matchmaking recommendations to helping users start better conversations.