Leveraging contractor insights to accelerate innovation

By Jenny Yu.  

Dataforma’s latest updates show how contractor-driven design can improve functionality, speed and user experience. 

At a time when roofing contractors expect software to evolve quickly, Dataforma is leaning heavily into customer-driven development and AI-powered innovation. During a recent CoatingsTalk™ hosted by Karen Edwards, Dataforma leaders shared how direct contractor collaboration is reshaping the company’s development process. 

“We all know things are moving a lot faster,” said Mark Zeleznock, CEO and co-founder of Dataforma. “Contractors are driving our decisions because our best source of ideas is the contractors we have. Thousands of contractors use this every day, and the feedback that we get is driving our decisions.” 

According to Mark, the company continuously gathers user insights through webinars, customer relationships and annual design summits. Rather than developing features in isolation, Dataforma actively prototypes ideas with contractors before pushing updates into production.  

This process has become even faster with AI development tools. Mark said AI is helping the company dramatically reduce development timelines while improving testing and quality. “We’re seeing two to five times speedups in the development of product,” he said. “This year will probably be the most productive year in Dataforma history since the year I founded it.” 

Brian Cook, COO of Dataforma, emphasized that the company’s agile development model allows teams to release improvements quickly instead of waiting months for major launches. “We’re producing it every week,” Brian said. “We try not to wait too long to produce functionality. We’re doing little bits of functionality every week versus waiting half a year to get something out and then find out it’s not correct.” 

One major outcome of that contractor collaboration is a new preventive maintenance and service contract management system expected to launch this summer. Mark said the functionality came directly from conversations during the company’s 2025 design summit. “We’ve built a system that’s going to revolutionize the way our contractors manage preventive maintenance and service contracts,” he said. 

Listen to the podcast or Watch the webinar to learn more about Dataforma’s development strategy, AI integration and upcoming software releases.