Single-Tenant SaaS Launch
Opportunity Space
DataRobot served two ends of the deployment spectrum.
1. Multi-tenant SaaS provided fast feature delivery, uptime SLAs, easy collaboration, and many other benefits, but some customers needed stronger isolation guarantees.
2. On-prem provided customers with strong isolation, but slow upgrades and heavy operational burden (Kubernetes, infra complexity, long deployment timelines).
After a series of discovery interviews I determined that a growing segment of enterprise and regulated customers wanted SaaS velocity with single-tenant security posture. Without it, we were losing or stalling deals that required clearer guarantees around isolation, governance, and compliance.
Strategy
These deployments were operationally expensive. I positioned Single-Tenant SaaS as a first-class product line, not a one-off deployment exception.
In tandem with that, we put security at the forefront of everything, providing isolation guarantees and a clear threat model.
I developed a castle analogy to make the architecture intuitive and easy to explain to non-technical stakeholders.
With this foundation we believed we'd be able to unlock new enterprise and regulated revenue we couldn’t win with existing deployment options.
Compliance
I drove delivery end-to-end across product, engineering, security, pricing, and GTM.
The initial customers were all large healthcare providers and required HIPAA compliance.
I worked with the security and engineering teams to address any compliance gaps and attest that we were adhering with the HIPAA Security Rule.
Launch and Enablement
I collaborated across multiple teams to deliver a successful launch.
Pricing
- Projected low / medium / high cost estimates across regions and cloud providers.
- Identified cost-reduction techniques to further improve margins.
GTM enablement
- Created pitch decks, 1-pagers, positioning docs, FAQs, onboarding instructions, and security guides.
- Supported active deal cycles, helping close and accelerate multiple six-figure contracts.
Impact
- Built brand trust in the industry.
- Provided sellers with flexibility to meet customers with unique requirements, like data sovereignty.
- The largest deal in company history was done on Single-Tenant SaaS.
Lessons Learned
Treating STS as a true product line created clarity, ownership, and scalability. The security-first narrative made value obvious and differentiated us from “SaaS-only” competitors. In hindsight, I wish I pushed to invest earlier in self-service deployment tooling to reduce operational load.
Enterprise growth often hinges on trust as much as features. The win wasn’t just shipping a different architecture, it was building a repeatable story + SKU + GTM motion that turned compliance needs into revenue.