A nontrivial amount of bugs fixed upstream are found and reported against in-support versions of RHEL. But in a broader sense, there's no "immediate return on investment" pressure here.
We work with upstream communities. So there are upstream planning meetings which set feature development, which anyone is free to participate in, or we directly participate in apache/openssl/gnome/openstack/whatever meetings. New features are set and developed by the upstream product, where we (as developers) spend a lot of our time. We're not doing it in-house and pushing it back.
We try to make sure they're tested and stable through CI and QE testing (foo-1.2.3.noarch gets marked as the version in which bug #1234 is fixed in -- QE tests and verifies this before release).
There's some emphasis there because Satellite, Openstack, RHEV, and other "server" product entitlements and support are our revenue stream, but there's a significant desktop team, and kernel team, etc. We as a company are much less focused on what makes money and more interested in "what's the best tool for this job" and "how can we push Linux forward".
To that end, there's a heavy lean towards GTK/GNOME solutions over QT, but that's more culture than corporate direction. And there's a "disproportionate" amount of effort towards server products because that's what people use Linux for and that's what we work on, but the community drives our priorities, not the other way around. We're a relatively small company (for our revenue), and people work in one area. If I'm working on Openstack (upstream and downstream), pretty much all my effort is going there and none is going towards Firefox (or whatever). But being on a product team/niche isn't any different at Red Hat than anywhere else.