Design a Tinder Feature to Cut Ghosting After Users Match
Company: Tinder
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product Design & Strategy
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
You are a product manager at Tinder. The company wants to cut down on ghosting, where one person in a match goes silent without any explanation and the other is left waiting. Choose one feature you would build to address it and explain your reasoning.
```hint Ask why people go quiet
List the reasons a matched user stops replying, from having too many open chats to finding it awkward to say no, and let the reason that dominates in your chosen group of users decide the feature.
```
### Clarifying Questions
- Which kind of ghosting matters most: matches where nobody sends a first message, conversations that die partway through, or someone vanishing after agreeing to meet?
- Is the main goal a better experience for the person left waiting, or more matches turning into dates?
- Should the feature serve all users, or may it target a group such as people with many unanswered chats or new users?
- Are there limits, for example no paid-only features or no changes to how matching works?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- A measurable definition of ghosting and a clear choice of which kind the answer targets
- Root causes on both sides of a match, the person who goes quiet and the person left waiting, tied to a chosen user segment
- One specific feature with its user flow, chosen over alternatives through explicit prioritization
- Safety and emotional impact: the feature must never pressure anyone to keep talking to someone they feel unsafe with, or make rejection more painful than silence
- A success metric, guardrails and an experiment design that accounts for both people in a match being affected
### Follow-up Questions
- Your feature makes it easy to end a chat politely, but the people receiving those messages say they feel worse. What do you change?
- How would you run the A/B test when a treated user and an untreated user share the same conversation?
- Would you ever penalize people who ghost often, for example by showing their profile to fewer people? What could go wrong?
Overview: A product sense question about reducing ghosting on Tinder by choosing one feature to build. It tests how a candidate defines ghosting so it can be measured, finds why matched users go silent, weighs safety and emotional impact, and designs metrics and an experiment where both people in a match are affected.