What Makes Rover’s Product Model Stand Out
Many companies aspire to be product-led, but few integrate data, experimentation, and customer insights into their strategy as seamlessly as Rover. As the world’s largest network of pet care providers, Rover has built a product operating model that deeply integrates data, experimentation, and customer insights into decision-making and planning.
Adaptivity’s Principal Consultant, Jeff Steinberg, recently sat down with Matt Sternberg, VP of Product and Marketplace at Rover, to discuss how Rover has built a product operating model that fosters innovation, empowers teams and puts customer value at the center of every decision. Their discussion provides useful takeaways for product managers, team leads, and executives who want to strengthen their approach to setting product strategy and building a strong product-led organization.
From Nuclear Physics to Product Leadership
Before leading product at Rover, Matt Sternberg spent over a decade as a nuclear particle physicist. While the transition to tech might seem unconventional, Matt found that his background in experimental physics provided a strong foundation for navigating complex product challenges.
“What I found was that a lot of what I’d been trained to do as a experimental physicist actually adapted really, really well to product and to data science,” Matt explains.
Physics trained him to approach ambiguity with structured experimentation, which turned out to be an essential skill in product management.
“You can do anything when you’re building a product, and you can do anything when you’re in the laboratory,” he notes. “But you usually have some really clear and focused outcome that you’re trying to get to. And the question is, what’s the sequence of events? What’s the strategy and what’s the approach I should take so that I don’t find out that I’ve spent five years working on the wrong problem.”
Matt credits his early mentors, including Jeff Steinberg, for helping him shift his focus toward the lean startup principles of failing fast and validating ideas quickly. Applying these ideas has significantly influenced Rover’s data-driven product approach.
Empowered Product Teams: The Backbone of Rover’s Strategy
One of Rover’s defining traits as a product-led organization is its commitment to empowering product managers. But what does empowerment look like on a daily basis?
Matt explains that it starts with hiring the right people, those who are outcome-oriented, analytically strong, and comfortable with ambiguity. From there, Rover aligns the organization around strategic objectives and gives PMs the autonomy to own their decisions.
Rather than dictating specific features for teams to build, Rover focuses on aligning around desired outcomes. By doing so, product managers can take ownership of their work and determine the best path to success.
Their empowerment doesn’t give product managers free rein but helps to make sure they have the right tools, frameworks, and leadership support to make informed decisions. Leadership plays a key role in clearing roadblocks, ensuring efficiency, and making sure trade-offs align with business objectives.
How Rover Strikes a Balance Between Autonomy and Alignment
One of the toughest challenges for any product-led organization is maintaining alignment across teams while still giving individual contributors the autonomy to innovate. Rover has tackled this by making sure that every team fully understands the overarching business goals and the core customer problems they are working to solve. Instead of simply handing down priorities, leadership explains the reasoning behind strategic objectives. When teams understand the ‘why,’ they can better prioritize their work and make smart trade-offs when needed.
To maintain alignment across a growing organization, Rover also places a strong emphasis on roadmap visibility. Initially, the company operated on shorter planning cycles, which limited long-term visibility and made it harder to align teams around strategic goals. Over time, they adopted OKRs to provide clearer direction and prioritize the most important business and customer outcomes. Extending the planning horizon to six months allowed for more ambitious initiatives while maintaining the flexibility to adjust based on new insights and changing conditions.
At the same time, leadership recognizes that strict planning can sometimes hold back innovation. Since new insights and customer feedback frequently shift priorities, teams regularly reassess their progress and adjust their strategies as needed. Rather than following a fixed plan, they have the freedom to adapt. Leaders encourage teams to adapt when data points to new opportunities, keeping the focus on delivering real impact instead of just completing a list of features.
A Thoughtful Approach to Product Portfolio Planning
A major factor that sets Rover’s product approach apart is the company’s thoughtful approach to portfolio planning. Instead of focusing solely on high-risk, high-reward projects, the company spreads its efforts across a mix of short-term enhancements, mid-range improvements, and long-term initiatives.
“We don’t want our portfolio to be all high-risk, high-reward bets and then go, okay, we’re going to roll into the year placing five high-risk, high-reward bets that could all fail and then have nothing to show, no progress for our customers,” Matt explains. “But then a lot of the features that they want day-to-day, there might be bigger things that we could do, bigger shots that we could take that might be more transformative for them and high risk.”
By thoughtfully distributing resources across different risk profiles, Rover maintains steady progress while still leaving room for bold innovations. The company deliberately balances investments across near-term improvements, mid-range initiatives, and high-risk, high-reward bets. While some efforts focus on optimizing existing features to enhance customer experience and drive profitability, others aim to tackle long-term strategic problems that require extended experimentation.
Rover takes a balanced approach to investment, considering both short-term optimizations and long-term strategic bets. Their structured resource allocation allows the team to take calculated risks while continuously delivering incremental value to customers.
The Role of Data in Every Decision
For Rover, data is embedded into the fabric of product development from discovery to delivery. Every potential investment begins with a business case informed by customer insights, user research, and quantitative analysis.
When launching new experiments, teams define specific learning objectives to validate key hypotheses quickly. Data isn’t just used for decision-making but also for measuring success rigorously.
“Our default is to experiment, and then we follow very, very rigorous internal standards around that,” Matt says. “With all the different ways and types of experiments that you can have, we want to have an environment where PMs, designers, analysts, and engineering managers can get exposure to.”
Beyond experimentation, Rover uses real-time monitoring to quickly detect issues, leveraging tools like Datadog for event stream monitoring and internal dashboards for A/B test tracking. Product managers and analysts continuously review these dashboards to spot anomalies, while the customer support and operations teams provide crucial frontline feedback. If a new feature leads to unexpected friction for users, support teams flag these cases early, even when the issue affects only a small percentage of customers. A rapid feedback loop allows Rover to address problems quickly, whether by iterating on the feature, rolling back changes, or refining user education.
Cultural Principles That Sustain a Product-Led Organization
While structured processes help guide Rover’s product teams, the company’s culture is what truly drives success. Collaboration, accountability, and adaptability are embedded in everyday decision-making, allowing teams to stay aligned while moving quickly.
One of Rover’s core cultural principles is the absence of office politics. Decisions are made based on what is best for customers and the business rather than individual career ambitions. Employees are encouraged to focus on solving meaningful problems rather than navigating internal hierarchies or vying for recognition. Maintaining alignment with company-wide goals allows teams to prioritize collective success over individual achievements.
A key part of Rover’s culture is creating an environment where teams feel safe taking risks. Instead of punishing mistakes, the company encourages thoughtful experimentation and treats failure as a chance to learn. Teams are expected to test new ideas, push boundaries, and take bold steps forward, while also being quick to recognize when something isn’t working and make adjustments. The focus isn’t on avoiding failure altogether but on learning from setbacks in a way that leads to meaningful improvements and long-term success.
Rover values discipline in the way teams debate. Constructive disagreement is not only welcomed but expected. Instead of simply critiquing an idea, team members are encouraged to offer alternative solutions. Encouraging team members to contribute viable alternatives fosters deeper engagement in problem-solving and leads to well-informed decisions. Employees are expected to raise concerns and contribute to collaboratively refining and improving ideas.
Matt highlights the importance of defining clear decision-making ownership:
“One of the best ways to enable empowerment is to be really clear about who owns a decision,” he says. “And so we try to put our PMs in a position where if they own something. Whoever owns that decision does have a responsibility to get input from their stakeholders and share those things out. If there’s a key stakeholder who needs to be a part of a decision and maybe a voice of opposition, we have an obligation to make sure they’re in the room to be a part of the conversation.”
Fostering these cultural principles in daily operations gives teams the confidence to take initiative, question existing approaches, and continuously refine both the product and the overall business.
Rapid Iteration and Continuous Learning
Rover rolls out multiple product updates daily, giving teams the ability to test ideas and make improvements quickly. Engineers and product managers work closely together, regularly launching new features and refining the product in real time.This rapid pace enables experimentation, and if something doesn’t work as expected, the team can roll back changes within hours instead of waiting through lengthy release cycles.
Matt describes Rover’s release cycle as happening multiple times a day, sometimes even multiple times per hour. He explains that frequent releases enable the team to quickly gather feedback and make necessary adjustments, reducing the time between identifying a problem and implementing a solution.
Rover’s ability to move quickly is supported by detailed monitoring and analysis. Internal dashboards track each release in real time, giving teams immediate insight into how new features are performing. Product managers and analysts regularly examine key metrics, such as conversion rates, engagement levels, and error reports. When something unexpected happens, the customer support and operations teams help uncover issues that data alone might not reveal.
Real-time monitoring, continuous A/B testing, and structured post-release analysis give Rover deep insights into user behavior and business impact. Teams use this constant flow of feedback to refine ideas, make quick adjustments, and act on new opportunities as they arise.
Key Takeaways for Product Teams
Rover’s success as a product-led company offers useful lessons for businesses aiming to improve their product outcomes and business impact during times when change, uncertainty, competition, and disruptive technologies are significant threats.
- When teams have clear goals, the freedom to make decisions, and strong leadership support, they can innovate more effectively.
- A mix of short-term wins and long-term investments keeps the business growing while making room for meaningful breakthroughs.
- Embedding data into every stage of product development—from discovery to testing to post-launch—improves decision-making and iteration.
- A strong product culture encourages constructive debate, collaboration across teams, and a focus on continuous learning.
For organizations aiming to build a resilient and high-performing product function, Rover’s approach offers a strong example. By creating a product operating model that prioritizes data-driven decisions, ongoing experimentation, and strategic clarification and combining it with a customer-first mindset and enabling product culture, companies can develop empowered teams that continuously adapt and drive sustainable growth.
