Project
About project
About project
About project
In 2022, the landscape of the Russian travel market shifted: Booking, Airbnb, and Skyscanner left Russia, and millions of users began looking for alternatives to the services they were used to. For major Russian companies, this created a window of opportunity that could close just as quickly as it had opened.
In summer 2021, the Yandex Travel team began working on a mobile app. At the time, there was no guarantee that a standalone mobile product would succeed, so expanding the in-house team for an experimental project would have been risky. Instead, Yandex strengthened its internal team with Doubletapp engineers, with 14 specialists working on the project at its peak.
When international companies left the Russian market, development was already well underway. With the team already in place, Yandex Travel was able to launch at exactly the moment when demand for Russian travel apps began to grow rapidly.
The Challenge
The Challenge
The Challenge
The Yandex Travel team needed to bring the first version of the mobile app to market within a tight timeframe. At the same time, the project was still a product hypothesis being tested: no one could say in advance whether the mobile channel would become a new growth driver, making it impractical to expand the permanent team for a temporary initiative.
The optimal solution was to augment the mobile development team with external engineers. However, Yandex needed more than just strong developers. It needed specialists who could perform well in technical interviews and quickly integrate into the processes of a large product team, and work at the same pace as Yandex employees from day one.
The goal was to scale development without sacrificing speed or quality while maintaining consistent engineering standards, team culture, and a high delivery cadence.
The Solution
The Solution
The Solution
Doubletapp joined the project under a staff augmentation model and gradually expanded the Yandex Travel mobile team. At its peak, 14 of our specialists were working on the project simultaneously: iOS and Android developers, QA engineers, and team leads.
We systematically develop engineering expertise in-house, so our specialists joined projects fully prepared to work in modern Big Tech product teams. We invest heavily in:
- regular training and mentoring
- technical interview preparation
- mock interviews
- systematic reviews of architectural challenges
Thanks to this preparation, our specialists successfully passed the selection process and were able to work according to Yandex's engineering standards from day one.
The onboarding process didn't end once they joined the project.
We took responsibility for making sure the external team worked like an in-house team. Doubletapp managers regularly met with project leads, team leads, and management, helping resolve organizational issues. For example, we arranged for Doubletapp employees to work from the Yandex office so that the teams could participate in shared activities and communicate more closely. This approach helped maintain a high level of team engagement throughout the project.
Integration was also accelerated by a shared engineering culture. Doubletapp's core team consists of former Yandex employees, giving them a strong understanding of internal processes, engineering quality standards, and the way different teams collaborate. This helped the team get through the onboarding stage quickly, minimize organizational barriers, and make the external team a fully integrated part of the product.
Results
Results
Results
Strengthened the team and helped bring the product to market.
Developing a new product in Big Tech is rarely a quick process, with projects typically taking six to twelve months from conception to launch. But by bringing in external specialists with experience in delivering high-quality commercial products quickly, the Yandex Travel team was able to launch the app at a time when the market was particularly in need of a domestic alternative to international services.
In less than a year after launch, the service nearly doubled its share of the online booking market and became one of the leading Russian travel aggregators. The app's launch attracted significant attention and was covered by leading business media outlets, including Forbes, RBC, and Kommersant.
Strengthened our in-house mobile development expertise.
At the end of 2023, the company received a Gold Award in the Runet Rating for developing the first version of the Yandex Travel mobile app.
The project also became the foundation for a series of expert publications. Doubletapp engineers wrote and published articles about architectural solutions, spoke at industry conferences, recorded podcasts, and shared their hands-on experience of developing a large-scale mobile product with the professional community.
Contributed to the development of digital services for the travel industry.
The expertise gained while working on Yandex Travel became the foundation for new projects in the travel sector. Some of them are subject to NDAs, but this project opened up a new direction for our team and gave us the opportunity to contribute to the development of services used by millions of travelers every day.
