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"The app models are getting better every day,” he said. "I expect that, within five to ten years, we'll effectively be done with dating as we know it. Users will log in and answer a few questions, which will give us a complete personality profile. From that, they'll be matched with their perfect partner to live forever and ever amen with. This will be the ‘Happily Ever After’ app.”
I wrote that down. Despite the software’s abysmal performance, the “Happily Ever After” app wasn’t a bad slogan. It was worth running by the marketing team.
Erik wore a frayed and washed out Battlestar Galactica shirt that showed how out of touch he was with the modern dating population. It wasn’t even from the revival version of the show. This was from the original.
"Erik," I said, pausing to compose my thoughts, "I have a friend who’s using the current build of Matchmaker Plus, and I don't know how to put it exactly, so I'll just say it bluntly: The app is a complete ass."
He nodded. "It's in alpha; what do you expect?”
"You told me beta last week."
“The software itself is in beta, but the algorithms and backend are in alpha.”
The tech stuff was beyond me. I didn’t care about this nitty gritty information — that was for him to worry about. All that I needed to know about was the big picture.
“I don’t know what that means…”
“Front end is interface and what the user interacts with,” he said, like he’d told me a million times before. “It’s like…”
“Erik, the app is complete shit," I cut him off so that he wouldn’t go on with all the technical crap for hours. “It’s non-functional. Non-sensical even. It’s matching my wild bassist neighbor with suburban moms who use swear jars. Tell me, has the app provided a single successful match?"
Erik thought for a second. "Well, it depends on what you mean by successful."
I sighed. "We've been running this beta..."
"Alpha," he corrected.
"This alpha for four weeks now."
"Correct."
"With five thousand users in the Southern California area.”
"Yes."
"Do we have confirmation of a single date occurring?"
Erik looked to his team; the five members all looked at him and shrugged.
"We don't know."
"You don't know."
"There's no way of telling for sure," he said. "There's no feature in the app to report if you went on a date and if it was successful or not."
"Okay," I said, "so let's make a ticket for that. How long would that take to implement?"
He looked to his team. Cheryl, a young coder of 22, put up two fingers.
"Two story points," he said.
Two story points was the equivalent of about a day's work.
"Let's prioritize that, then. The data team has been dying for new metrics, and whether or not these people are even going on dates seems like a pretty useful bit of data for them, does it not?”
Erik nodded.
"How can we do this?" I asked. "We need to have a dating app that puts all the other ones to shame. That's what our goal was, remember the market research?"
