Staff augmentation for a 40+ million user platform

RESULT

40+
million

users having the best experience
Highlights
SEO optimization | Cross-platform development and migration | New business units experiments
Project goal
Scale and boost the client’s development capacity
Technologies
Django | React | React Native | Celery | Datadog

RESULT

40+ million

users having the best experience

Project goal

Scale and boost the client’s development capacity

Technologies

Django | React | React Native | Celery | Datadog

Highlights

SEO optimization | Cross-platform development and migration | New business units experiments

RESULTS

40+ millon

users having the best experience
Project goal

Scale and boost the client’s in-house dev team in a B2C software development project.

Highlights

SEO optimization | Cross-platform development and migration | New business units experiments

Technologies

Django | React | React Native | Celery | Datadog

A platform that makes the lives of pet parents easier

Graphic image showing Rover's website.
Graphic image showing Rover's website.

A platform that makes the lives of pet parents easier

Rover is a platform for booking pet sitters and dog walkers. It offers services such as house sitting, day care, dog walking, and more. Founded in 2011, Rover is the world’s largest network for pet owners and sitters in over 10 countries. It is a public company listed in Nasdaq that has millions of 5-star reviews and their app has been used by 2+ million pet parents.

Overcoming the pandemic impact with staffing

Pictures of software developers smiling and working on their computers.

Overcoming the pandemic impact with staffing

We first connected with Rover in the 2019 DjangoCon, in which both of our businesses were speakers. A few years later, their team reached out to ask for our help with software development needs.

After overcoming the pandemic difficulties that included reducing their dev team, they were ready to take their platform to the next level and recover their development capacity and speed. Octobot impressed the Rover team and we were their go-to choice thanks to our unique ability to quickly assemble a senior level team.

Pictures of software developers smiling and working on their computers.
Mockups of two cell phones showing Rover's app.

Staff augmentation model: complementing the in-house team

Mockups of two cell phones showing Rover's app.

B2C software development: complementing the in-house team

We kicked off our engagement with Rover in a small, punctual project for migrating part of their system to the newest version of Django. It was the perfect opportunity for both sides to evaluate the partnership: they could review our developers’ quality and work modality, and we dug deeper into their product and practices. After a successful first project, we decided to grow the team and continue to support Rover’s in-house development on different fronts.

From a 3-person team we grew the engagement until reaching a team of 12+ developers, working in 6 different teams inside Rover. Currently, the teams are organized based on a few different goals:

  • Growth team, responsible for increasing bookings from new clients in the platform. For that, they work mainly with SEO optimization and overall improvement of the product’s quality.

  • The team responsible for all the matching flow where a pet owner connects with a sitter, which includes search feature, mailing, user profiles, matching algorithms, and more. 

  • Another team in charge of making sure Rover fulfills all the cookies consent policies, such as GDPR and CCPA. 

  • Expansion team, responsible for working on new business units. As Rover detects opportunities to explore new markets and services, this team is in charge of implementing them by experimenting, measuring, and validating the best ones.

  • The Data team, in charge of making the most out of the tons of information managed in the platform.

  • Another team focused on user retention by making their experience so fantastic that they come back to Rover every time.

How the app works

Search
A pet owner opens Rover and, by entering the zip code, is able to see pet sitters and walkers nearby.
Connect
After checking out the different options in the map and reading verified reviews, the pet owner contacts the person that is the best match for their needs.
Match
Users can book and pay for the services they require at any time, thanks to Rover's 24/7 services. Besides pet sitting, they also offer services such as dog walking, day care, and training.
Search

A pet owner opens Rover and, by entering the zip code, is able to see pet sitters and walkers nearby.

Connect

After checking out the different options in the map and reading verified reviews, the pet owner contacts the person that is the best match for their needs.

Match

Users can book and pay for the services they require at any time, thanks to Rover's 24/7 services. Besides pet sitting, they also offer services such as dog walking, day care, and training.

Empowering each other in a positive engagement

The projects we work on affect over 40 million users. Our partnership with Rover has thrived due to the team's talent and high-quality standards, as well as our transparency and good rapport.

Some aspects of our outsourcing services that the client appreciates are our proximity in terms of time zone, cultural affinity, high English level, and more.

One of the greatest aspects about our teams’ collaboration is the frequent touchpoints that Rover's leaders and Product Managers have with our leadership team.

In these talks, they align expectations and share feedback about the team's work and motivation, which later translates into actionable goals that increase the devs' performance and fidelity to the project. We have even visited their offices in Seattle a couple of times!

1
countries
1 M
users
1 M
booked services
1 M
users
0
countries
0 M
booked services
Pictures of computers and other objects such as a bottle and airpods.
Pictures of computers and other objects such as a bottle and airpods.

A team dedicated to B2C software development

A team dedicated to continuous improvement

Over the years we've had many achievements, such as a great advance in the migration of functionalities initially created using native Android and iOS technology to React Native. We also implemented new business units such as a training service and an insurance for pets. To also make things easier for pet sitters, we’ve added a new calendar to offer a better overview of their schedule.

On SEO aspects, the team has made remarkable breakthroughs in improving the site speed and other technical factors using React with server-side rendering and CSS. As a result, the Rover brand increased their ranking over search engines. Using tools such as SEO Clarity and Google Lighthouse, they're constantly improving the platform's performance and supporting other teams to implement changes without affecting SEO standards.

Another challenge the team undertook was the migration to GitHub Actions and GitHub Codespaces, which made the production releases much more efficient and the general coding process faster.

On the Data Management aspect, we've also supported Rover's migrating a customer frequency project into DBT and Dagster, which resulted in a large cost reduction for the client.

You can learn more about our experience with Rover and their history of success in this episode of our podcast OctoTalks.

Pictures of computers and other objects such as a bottle and airpods.
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