Context
A $125M enterprise IoT subsidiary of Continental AG ($44B revenue). Fleet telematics. 82% subscription revenue. Historically dependent on a single OEM anchor account that was in structural decline, losing 30% of its ARR base over three years. The company needed a growth engine that did not depend on the declining anchor.
I owned the $70M growth portfolio. A three-layer architecture: vertical segment ARR, horizontal product revenue across all customer segments, and Continental parent product integration. 50+ matrixed engineers and PMs across the US, Europe, and Asia. Primary product strategy voice to the $44B parent. Board-level reporting.
Challenge
The company’s go-to-market motion was enterprise sales. High-touch. Long cycles. Professional installation required for every device. Every new customer required a technician dispatch, vehicle downtime for installation, and manual device configuration. Cost-to-serve was built into every unit sold.
The SMB fleet segment represented the largest addressable market by customer count but the economics did not work at enterprise-level cost-to-serve. The company needed a product-led growth platform that could serve SMB fleets with self-service onboarding, zero-touch provisioning, and consumer-grade activation. It did not exist. I built it.
Approach
Three components, all from scratch.
A self-service onboarding web app. Built as a new product. Customer signs up, enters fleet information, and begins the activation process without talking to a salesperson or scheduling a technician.
A zero-touch device provisioning system. The device powers on, connects to the cellular network, identifies itself, pulls its configuration from the cloud, and begins transmitting. No manual setup. No laptop connection. No technician on-site. I drove the ML-driven onboarding mandate that automated the provisioning workflow.
An all-new $0 customer activation and hardware pricing architecture. I designed a zero-down, hardware-as-a-service model. The customer pays nothing upfront for the device. Revenue comes from the subscription. Benchmarked against Verizon and Samsara. IFRS 16 compliant finance terms restructured in partnership with the finance team.
The hardware itself was a new product: the first end-to-end new hardware and software product at the company in over six years. Seven company firsts affirmed by the CEO and Continental AG leadership. First automated self-install. First Continental co-development. First utilization of Continental’s global engineering teams. First $0 standard pricing. First vocational-focused design. First light-duty purpose-built device. First new HW+SW in 6+ years.
I also made a proactive chipset selection decision that paid off dramatically. I chose a leading-edge chipset with a higher BOM cost. Leadership pushed back. When the global semiconductor shortage hit and the 3G sunset forced a fleet-wide migration of 111,000 legacy devices, the next-gen device I built shipped freely while the legacy product was production-constrained. I designed the cascading swap strategy across approximately 28,000 units that kept the migration on track.
Outcome
82% cost-to-serve reduction. Zero-touch provisioning eliminated technician dispatch, vehicle downtime, and manual configuration.
50,000+ connected devices deployed.
30% ARPU growth across the vocational segment: $26 to $34 per unit. 52% premium over all other verticals.
$10M secured from Continental AG for platform modernization by building and presenting the strategic business case.
15% greater close rate. 38% more units per account. $1M in new client revenue from the pricing model alone.
Total company ARR grew approximately 30% ($78.5M to $102M) during a period when the largest account declined 30%. My growth portfolio generated approximately $27M in net growth against a $4M structural headwind.
After Continental sold the company to a PE acquirer in 2024, the acquirer disposed of their own competing product and kept mine. The product is still shipping three years after my departure with 20x more proprietary data per unit than aftermarket competitors.
Lesson
Product-led growth in enterprise B2B is not a consumer trick. It is an economic model. The self-service motion, the zero-touch provisioning, and the $0 activation model were not about making the product “easy.” They were about making the unit economics work for a market segment that could not afford the enterprise cost-to-serve.
The second lesson: the chipset decision. Supply chain design is product strategy. The choice of components, the BOM cost negotiations, the relationship with the semiconductor vendor. These are product decisions that determine whether you can ship when the market needs you most. The proactive bet on a more expensive chipset saved the migration. It also proved that the higher BOM cost was justified by the resilience it bought.