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Influencing a strategic product vision that gained buy-in from executive leadership
COMPANY
Samsara
MY ROLE
Design Researcher
PROJECT TYPE
Internship
TIMEFRAME
10 weeks—2024
OVERVIEW
challenge
The team needed to expand the current truck driver coaching product to include behaviors beyond safety, but it was unclear what this experience should look and feel like.
Team & Role
Lead Design Researcher: Led alignment workshops, research strategy, and execution
Worked with: PM, designers, and customer success teams
Skills practiced
End-to-end research
Stakeholder alignment
Workshop facilitation
Business case development with data triangulation
Product visioning
Uncovered
5 key insights
Influenced
4+ design changes
Projected savings for fleets
$20,000 / yr
Shaped
1 product vision
Context
Samsara is a leading IoT platform that helps 25,000+ fleets optimize safety and efficiency.
Their customers include trucking, construction, agriculture, and logistics companies.
current state
The truck driver coaching product is limited to safety behaviors, leaving fleet managers without a way to easily track and coach on other behavior types.
While the existing coaching platform effectively increased driver safety and garnered strong customer satisfaction, it was limited to safety-related behaviors.
This left fleet managers unable to coach drivers on other costly issues like Hours of Service violations ($16,000+ fines) and excessive idling ($3,000+ annually per vehicle).
the Research challenge
Uncover the ideal experience that enables fleet managers to coach truck drivers effectively across multiple behavior types.
The team needed to present a unified coaching vision to executive leadership in order to gain buy-in to start building.
But first, we needed to uncover customer's expectations for a unified coaching platform.
Stakeholder Alignment
To get on the same page, I held a quick alignment workshop to ensure the research would be actionable and impactful.
From the start, It was unclear what we knew and what we still needed answers to.
So, I led an alignment workshop that helped transform the scattered individual questions into three straightforward research questions that would guide our project going forward.
guiding questions
From the workshop, 3 key questions emerged:
1
How do customers feel about the proposed unified coaching flow? Does it provide value to them?
2
What are customer’s expectations for a coaching effectiveness report?
3
What specific customization needs do customers have for setting up automation in a unified coaching workflow?
The business case
I had alignment on the team's goals, but also, how does this all connect back to the business?
Expand coaching beyond safety → Reduced compliance fines and idling costs for customers → Increased customer satisfaction, retention and spend
execution
Diving into the deep end of customer needs & hours of interviews later, a few key insights emerged.
8 customer interviews with fleet managers
4 interviews with customer success managers
1 literature review
main insight
Customers have fundamentally different mental models for safety coaching versus hours of service violations.
Hours of Service violations are even more critical to prevent and address immediately.
Customers want to track how effective their coaching program is.
Evaluating coaching effectiveness also includes understanding how the program is impacting their business.
Knowing how to coach a driver is just as important as knowing who to coach.
Coaching workers effectively is not just about prioritizing who to coach. It’s also about how to coach them.
building a case
Now, how could I bring these insights to life?
The key insight that I wanted to drive home to the team was the need for proactive Hours of Service coaching.
Things I kept in mind as I was building out my research share out.
Create a visual for the insight as much as possible to provide a framework that the team can refer back to for months to come.
Bring in supporting numbers and data if available.
Provide both long and short term recommendations for the team to act on.
building a case
I first presented the high-level finding that fleet managers' mental models differ depending on the type of coaching.
I emphasized that because of legal implications, HoS violations hold a more significant weight for customers.
building a case
Next, I demonstrated one of the key differences between Hours of Service coaching and safety coaching.
This difference had to do with how Hours of Service coaching is often less straight forward and involves follow up conversations about the root cause of the violation.
building a case
Finally, I triangulated my findings by including recent industry data that shows that Hours of Service violations are a growing area of concern.
This ensured that my recommendation was rooted in the reality of customer's current context.
The outcome
In the end, the case for proactive Hours of Service coaching was accepted.
The team's response was positive, and my push for prioritizing proactive HoS coaching led to its inclusion in the roadmap.
Although my internship ended before I saw my research's outcome, I recently learned that many ideas proposed through the research have been shipped and are in customer's hands.
the impact
The team gained executive support for the Unified Coaching Vision, which was grounded in research insights. Parts of this vision are live in the product today.
BUSINESS IMPACT
Revenue growth: Expanding coaching capabilities positions Samsara to capture more revenue from existing customers and attract new enterprise customers.
Competitive differentiation: Unified coaching vision addresses a key market gap, positioning Samsara ahead of competitors.
CUSTOMER IMPACT
Cost savings: Potential $20,000+ in yearly fleet savings.
Operational efficiency: Streamlined workflows reduce fleet managers' time spent on driver coaching by consolidating multiple behavior types.
"To have coaching across safety, fuel efficiency, and compliance is amazing. Previously, we were asking managers to go to multiple places and products to coach for those things. This experience is exactly what we’ve been talking about.” (VP Safety, Shipping & Logistics Company)
TEAM IMPACT
"Sarah played a critical role in defining and refining our vision for Unified Coaching… Along the way, her workshops helped Product and Design prioritize the vision on the most impactful customer needs." (Senior Product Designer II)
"Sarah took the initiative during our weekly group syncs to help the team align on the core areas we wanted to focus on during research, drove recruitment, and worked with the team on a research script and analysis that could be used to support the updated vision that we presented to our executive leadership team.” (Senior Product Manager II)
Reflection
What I'll bring with me to future projects…
Stakeholder alignment as strategy: Getting everyone on the same page early prevents scope creep and ensures research efforts target the right questions. There's no such thing as asking for too much clarity from your stakeholders!
Thinking both long term and short term: I learned that the most impactful research has actionable insights for the team in the short-term, but also challenges our thinking of the future. I tried to balance the two
Building relationships with customer success: In B2B environments, customer success managers should be key partners for us. I utilized their knowledge about our customers when planning the research as well as relied on them for recruitment help. It would've been impossible without them!
