If you’re a Red Rover customer, you already know we’re deeply committed to listening to our partner school districts. We believe the best product improvements are shaped by real K-12 HR needs.
But how does customer feedback actually make its way into our product roadmap?
To offer an inside look at how ideas and insights become real features, we sat down with Engineering Director John Linton.
For over five years, John has helped guide the evolution of Red Rover’s two longest-standing products, Absence Management and Time Tracking. His role centers on empowering our development teams and ensuring we’re building tools that function well and meaningfully support the day-to-day challenges schools face.
In this Q&A, John shares how customer insights influence our roadmap, the process behind turning feedback into action, and why close collaboration with districts is essential to building technology that truly supports K–12 operations.
It’s continually a balancing act. Our mindset has always been to do what is best for our customers. That is the framework we use whenever we approach anything we do. So, whether that is prioritizing our long-term innovation, performing maintenance, incremental enhancements, or any feature that is of immediate need, our approach is to do the right thing for the school districts we serve.
This allows us to be nimble. We don't have a rigid and well documented long-term roadmap. We believe that we serve our customers best by being responsive so that we can put our focus on areas that are most impactful. At the same time, we certainly keep sight of long-term initiatives. What we want to avoid is pigeonholing ourselves into anything that would keep us from focusing on what districts really need.
We have our eyes set on the future and where we want to drive innovation in our market space, but we also are very much focused on the here and now, on what our customers are currently facing and try to solve their problems on a day-to-day basis.
It makes it through many different ways and multiple sources. Sometimes that method can be directly from the customer. We have a Canny Board where our customers can submit ideas and vote on them. That voice is directly piped into our planning meetings when we gather to determine what we work on next.
I believe this is very important because this feedback comes firsthand from the customer and gives us the understanding of what problem they are trying to solve, how many districts also find this valuable, and provides us with wonderful and helpful context.
I am really proud of our culture here at Red Rover and how truly tight our feedback loop is from our end users to our developers; there is a very thin layer between them. We get quick and frequent feedback through our world-class customer support team who are always working alongside our customers.
Our product engineering department is glued to the hip of customer service. We have a daily touchpoint where we gather each morning to talk about the pressing needs of the day and then also have a sync meeting between the two departments at the end of each week to ensure we’re aligned and serving our customers as best as we can.
One of our core values is customer empathy, and that mentality of excellent customer service isn't reserved for a specific department or certain individuals. It's in every employee we hire. We seek to only hire individuals who will embody this core value.
In some way, shape, or form, customer feedback always informs everything we do.
But focusing on a more recent and specific example, we lately delivered a feature that was requested by customers to allow admins access to a report regarding information on subs who had to cancel from a job that they've either accepted or were assigned to.
This information is very valuable for different districts for different reasons. Which is why we tried to solicit feedback from several different districts who have expressed their desire for this feature. Some districts are looking for this report for payroll purposes, while for others, it’s valuable information that informs certain business operational decisions. We took all this feedback, aggregated it together, and delivered something that was valuable to those districts.
Feedback and input from our customers are our primary drivers. We are constantly refining and enhancing our current features, and yet, at the same time, we are working on completely new features as well. Most times, we have multiple streams of work where we balance both objectives. There are needs out there where we have not built a solution yet. We are constantly evaluating and prioritizing new features and solving the unique problems K-12 has to offer in creative and collaborative ways. Our objective is for our platform to be modern and intuitive. That requires us to continually refine and enhance our features.
Every feature is unique in its own way, which is why it is helpful to have several voices involved in the decision-making process so we can ensure what we decide to work on next is the most impactful for our customers. We thrive on hearing what their problems are and enjoy finding solutions for them - it fuels us to be able to serve them better.
I believe most customers know this already, but they might not realize how radically important it is that we are always trying to solve our customers’ problems. We strive to deliver value every single day. Nothing about our system is set on a shelf and forgotten about. We are always refining it, improving it, and always continuing to press forward to deliver value.
This can only be done because of our incredibly healthy culture here at Red Rover. Our core values aren't something that's simply highlighted on a webpage. We truly embody them in everything we do, and we continue to hire more employees who encompass these core values.
I really enjoy seeing how what we do impacts the lives of others. This can range from seeing a customer have a great experience with a new feature, or maybe how our software enables employees and substitutes to find employment, work a job, and get paid. It can also be seeing an admin who has been performing a heavily manual and repetitive task now get empowered with better automation and tooling that makes their lives significantly simpler and more organized.
Those are many of the joys we get to experience first-hand, but there are also benefits to the work that we do that are more indirect that we don’t have direct insight into, but we still know that they are happening. The reality is that teachers take absences. And when they are absent, a classroom and students are now missing a teacher. Knowing that our software is easy to use and allows substitutes to quickly accept those available vacancies puts an educator in the classroom. When a district has exceptionally high fill rates, the next generation is served with excellence.