Conventional wisdom says startups need to obsess over focus and saying no. I myself push this line a lot because I find most do not focus enough. Yet Samsara did the opposite - saying yes to as much as humanly possible - and successfully scaled from monitoring cheese trucks to a $12 billion operations platform serving 20,000+ customers.

From discovering their first product in a Northern California cheese factory to building AI-powered dash cameras that became their #1 revenue driver, Sekar shares the counterintuitive strategies behind one of the decade's most successful B2B platforms.

Guest: Kiren Sekar, Chief Product Officer at Samsara

First Round Review - In Depth Podcast

Key insights:

Many B2B companies chase enterprise whales or SMB volume. Samsara planted itself in the middle - and that shaped everything.

"Large enterprises have customer-specific requirements," Sekar explains. "SMBs deploy fast, but lack the depth of feedback from professional users using the product all day."

Mid-market customers (200-2,000 employees) provided the perfect laboratory. Large enough for professional buyers who could articulate detailed feedback, but small enough they couldn't demand 50 custom features. They deployed fast - enabling rapid iteration impossible with six-month enterprise procurement.

When 50-80% of customers requested the same thing, Samsara built it, shipped it, and immediately saw adoption.

The strategy solved the "consulting trap." Mid-market customers expected standardised products, forcing repeatable, cross-cutting solutions. One-off work became rare. Every feature had to work for dozens of customers.

"The bridge from mid-market to enterprise, we could do very incrementally," Sekar notes. Today, most business is enterprise, but those mid-market roots preserved product velocity.

Key Takeaways:

Samsara spent eight weeks building a prototype, then let customers tell them what to build.

"When you bring data and visibility to an environment where there previously was none, it is just useful," Sekar recalls. The technology bet was clear—cheap sensors, cellular connectivity, cloud—but the application wasn't. Temperature monitoring? Water utilities? Vehicle tracking?

So they didn't pick. They built a simple box with a cellular radio connecting inputs to software. Goal: install in 100 customer environments across multiple industries. Fast.

"Showing customers what was possible, showing them a totally different user experience—that's what worked."

The temperature sensing hypothesis came first. Early customers said: "These things don't really fail. This is not a real problem."

Then Cowgirl Creamery, a Northern California cheese producer, said: "Where we lose product is in trucks, in transit. Can you put one of these on a truck?"

That single conversation redirected the entire company. They connected the device to a vehicle and suddenly found a cascade of problems: no vehicle visibility, no engine diagnostics, no compliance tracking. Each discovery unlocked another paying use case.

Testing across industries simultaneously (cheese producers, construction fleets, water utilities) spotted patterns single-vertical focus would've obscured.

Key Takeaways:

The startup playbook: pick one vertical, nail it, then expand. Samsara ignored that.

"A lot of people say you need to say no and focus," Sekar acknowledges. "But you should also say, for a customer, how could I say yes to as much as possible?"

This was strategic breadth. They worked backwards from revenue goals and asked: "If we sold fleet tracking to every cheese company, how quickly do we run out of market?" Vertical focus was a dead end.

"By engaging with a broad market, we picked and chose what to build for the most impact." School bus fleet feedback created features construction companies loved. Food distribution compliance inspired tools utilities adopted immediately.

Take location-sharing. School bus customers wanted to share real-time bus locations with parents. Samsara built a live tracking link. Then they showed it to construction companies.

"I'm a construction company and dump trucks sit around for half an hour waiting," Sekar recalls customers saying. "If they could have a tracking link, they'd have everything ready when that truck arrives."

One industry's request became every industry's killer feature. This required deliberately maintaining broad customer exposure.

They structured operations around it. "Transportation Tuesdays"—every Tuesday dedicated to transportation customers. Rest of the week: food and beverage, construction, different verticals. The pie chart of industries was monitored intentionally, preventing over-indexing.

The risk? Building shallow products. The check? Revenue. "If you don't meet the needs of an industry, they're not gonna buy your product." They had to go deep enough to close deals, but broad enough to build a platform.

From $1M to $17M to $70M ARR in three years—the breadth strategy worked.

Key Takeaways:

In year two, Samsara faced a classic dilemma. Massive backlog of fleet tracking features—location, fuel, compliance. Then customers started asking: "Is there a dash cam that works with your system?"

Conventional product management says: focus on the roadmap. Samsara did the opposite.

"We could have easily said no," Sekar admits. But two things made them pause. First, the question kept coming. Second, they saw a technology inflection.

Existing dash cams ran on 2G/3G networks with low-res video and clunky interfaces. But mobile phone adoption was driving down high-quality video costs and making 4G/LTE streaming viable. Samsara could build something fundamentally different.

They prototyped a dash camera integrated with their system. Gave it to customers. Response: "Wow, this is exciting."

That dash cam is now Samsara's #1 product by revenue.

What made this possible was willingness to deviate when customer signal and technology timing aligned. "Hearing the same question from more customers, and seeing a potential technology inflection."

This philosophy—saying yes when it stretches you—defined Samsara's approach. "By stretching yourself to say, how can we solve as much of your problem as humanly possible, that creates those outsized impacts," Sekar explains.

It wasn't reckless. Samsara maintained a long-term vision rooted in data and customer feedback. But roadmap details remained "very fluid and dynamic." The vision was stable, but the path adapted constantly.

The dash cam validated their platform strategy. Video wasn't standalone—it integrated with telematics, location tracking, compliance. New products made existing products better. Customers buying five products from Samsara instead of one from Samsara and four from competitors became the competitive moat.

Key Takeaways:

Most companies do quarterly surveys. Samsara got on planes to towns with no direct flights, drove three hours, and spent days in warehouses, truck depots, and construction sites.

"Part of it is just being willing to get on a plane," Sekar says. "It's indirect flights with a layover and then a three hour drive."

This was systematic. They identified early adopters and built structured relationships. "You quickly figure out who are the early adopters. And it makes them more engaged and loyal when they provide feedback."

The Customer Advisory Group became a product in itself. From early on, they'd invite customers to San Francisco for two-day sessions. Share roadmaps. Do "allergy tests"—show of hands, how many would find this useful?

"We did that very early on and still do it today. Very, very powerful," Sekar emphasises.

But real insights came from observing actual usage in customer environments. Not conference rooms—the field. Watching drivers use the product. Seeing what tasks took 50 repetitions per day.

When feedback is specific, usage-based, and comes from professional users, it's immediately actionable.

Acting on feedback creates a virtuous cycle. They engage more. Provide better feedback. Become advocates.

This influenced their go-to-market strategy. When they tried the channel partner approach that worked at Meraki, it flopped. Operations customers wanted direct relationships with Samsara. They wanted that feedback loop.

So Samsara leaned into it. Made it a competitive advantage. Built change management playbooks and structured feedback mechanisms reinforcing: we're not just selling software, we're partnering with you for years.

Key Takeaways:

Most product organisations optimise for engagement, usage, NPS. Samsara gave product managers revenue targets.

"Especially for newer products, revenue is the best metric for product-market fit," Sekar explains. "It's a proxy for customer value and impact."

This created clarity. Product managers knew what "good" looked like. Did customers pay for it? That's the signal.

But Sekar adds nuance. Revenue works brilliantly for new products. Less well for mature products.

"You could have revenue look healthy, but customer experience degrading, and that's gonna catch up with you."

The solution? Adjust metrics as products mature. Early-stage: revenue growth. Growth-stage: mix of revenue and engagement. Mature: customer experience, retention, usage depth.

Use the right metric for the product lifecycle stage. Don't force product-market fit products to optimise for NPS when they need to prove value. Don't let mature products coast on revenue when experience is degrading.

This extended to pricing. They didn't extract maximum value—they optimised for growth. "Are the unit economics sustainable, and is it a no-brainer for the customer? If yes, go sell it and grow."

"The market is so big that we end up doing better by optimising for growth and making an easy decision for customers whilst ensuring we've got healthy unit economics."

Revenue as north star, customer value as strategy.

Key Takeaways:

The typical startup path: founders sell until $5M ARR, then hire sales. Samsara flipped it. They hired an SDR before they had a product to sell.

"Their job was to book demos. Myself and one product manager could do live demos of what we were building."

Why? Testing messaging at scale. "Go call a hundred water utilities. Go call a hundred food and beverage distributors." Top-of-funnel signal revealed which verticals had urgency before building vertical-specific features.

But the deeper strategy was forcing scalable foundations from day one. Founder selling lets you work around product weaknesses. A sales team can't.

"The product needs to be really easy to demo because you need the sales team, not just the people setting the roadmap, to log into a dashboard and show the newest features."

This forced discipline. If a sales rep couldn't demo it, it wasn't ready. If the value proposition couldn't be pitched by multiple people, it wasn't clear enough. If trials didn't convert without founder hand-holding, the product didn't deliver fast enough time-to-value.

"We are going to build a small, but end-to-end sales machine. Something that if it's working, we can scale it." Full funnel: lead generation → demo → free trial → contract → deployment.

When it worked end-to-end, they doubled the team. Then doubled again. No founder bottleneck. No "rebuild sales when we get bigger" crisis.

The same thinking applied post-sales. They started with customer support (not success). "That is a very easy way to paper over things that make a product hard to use." If support was constantly resolving the same issues, those issues went into the product backlog.

Customer success came later, focused on change management—training thousands of drivers, installing devices in always-moving fleets. "Being able to make change management part of our pitch was super helpful."

Sekar contrasts this with legacy vendors. Those companies would bring in sensors from one vendor, connectivity from another, build bespoke software. "$50 million projects" that limited addressable market to massive enterprises.

Samsara's plug-and-play approach meant mid-market customers could deploy in an afternoon. Building for sales team scalability from day one forced product excellence.

Key Takeaways:

As Samsara moved upmarket, they hit a wall product features alone couldn't solve. Enterprises loved the technology—but they had 5,000 vehicles spread across regions, hundreds of frontline workers to train, and fleets that never stopped moving.

"How do I install devices in vehicles that are always in use? If they're not in use, I'm not making money."

Samsara realised deployment complexity was a sales blocker, not a product gap. So they turned change management into a product.

"We have the technology, but we will also help you be successful. You can get this done end to end in X months. Here's someone you can talk to who's gone through this, who looks like you."

The tactics came from listening to successful customer deployments, then codifying them. Take the dash cam rollout. Many drivers resisted: "This is Big Brother."

Customers who succeeded shared a pattern: start with the VP of Safety's own car. Then put cameras on the five safest drivers. Inevitably, one has an accident or near-miss where the camera proves they weren't at fault. Share that video. Then roll out fully alongside a safe-driver bonus programme—funded by savings from reduced accident rates.

Samsara packaged that into a repeatable playbook. "We started hearing these anecdotes and turning them into a playbook. Now it's really well packaged up."

This "product" evolved continuously. "We almost think of that as, it's not a technology product, but it is like a product. We're hearing about what works. We're finding ways to make it scalable and then baking it in."

The impact? Enterprise deals that might have stalled on "this is too complex" closed because Samsara could say: "Here's the 12-week deployment plan. Here's how companies like you got 10,000 drivers onboard in 90 days."

This reinforced the customer partnership narrative. "We're not just trying to solve a problem and move on. We're trying to partner with them for many years, which then turns into product feedback, which allows us to build more products."

Key Takeaways:

Samsara's journey from cheese trucks to $12 billion platform cuts against conventional product wisdom—but the results speak for themselves.

Customer obsession isn't a platitude. It's a strategic choice that costs something: saying yes when focus is easier, building breadth when depth feels safer, deviating from roadmaps when customers pull you in new directions. "It only counts when it costs you something."

For product leaders navigating today's pressure to ship fast and show ROI, Samsara demonstrates that breadth done right accelerates, rather than dilutes, product-market fit. The key is structure: Transportation Tuesdays, customer advisory groups, revenue as the check on whether you're deep enough.

The shift from founder-led sales to scalable sales teams before hitting $5M ARR forces uncomfortable product discipline early. Can your product be demoed by someone who didn't build it? If not, you're building a consulting business, not a product company.

Revenue as PM north star works—with nuance. Early products need it to validate real value. Mature products need different metrics to catch degrading experience before revenue drops. Use the right metric for the lifecycle stage.

And perhaps most contrarian: change management isn't post-sales overhead—it's competitive advantage. Enterprises buy confidence that deployment won't fail. Turning operational playbooks into repeatable "products" became Samsara's wedge into large accounts.

For operations, IoT, and infrastructure companies, Samsara's example is a direct playbook. For SaaS companies in other domains, the principles translate: broad early customer exposure reveals cross-cutting features, mid-market provides the best feedback density, and saying yes strategically creates platform value faster than vertical lock-in.

The technology has changed—AI now unlocks use cases that were impossible when Samsara started. "There's so much data in the system that is still untapped. LLMs are just radically changing how we could make that data useful for customers."

The lesson: customer obsession at scale isn't about building what every customer asks for. It's about listening broadly, identifying patterns, and building the 80-20 solutions that work for thousands—not custom solutions for one.

That’s a wrap.

As always, the journey doesn't end here!

Please share and let us know what you liked or want changing! 🚀👋

Alastair 🍽️.