Hi! I'm Kaegan, the human.
While the rest of the site leans on AI to do the talking, this page is all me, in my own words.
Quick backstory. I spent nearly eight years at Lumen5, an AI-powered video creator I joined as employee 9, helping to grow the team to 60 and nearly 10xing revenue.
I like to say that I've held every PM archetype for at least two to three years. If you want an activation and onboarding PM, I've done that. If you want pricing and monetization, I've done that. If you want AI features, I've done that. It's just the nature of a small company. We can't have every product function, so we can only have one for certain periods of time.
I'm looking for hands-on IC work: owning a product area end to end, shipping features, and working closely with engineers and designers. Growth and monetization especially, or product marketing at a company worth being loud about. kaegandonnelly@gmail.com
Growth
Activation and onboarding is where I spent the most time. Lumen5 had tens of thousands of signups a month, and the big one we would always be working on is time to first value: how quickly can we get a new user from, hey, I'm here to solve a problem, to something that shows them either the full solution or that we're close.
AI
The thing about Lumen5 is we were building as an AI-powered product well before just about anyone else, all the way back in 2018. I wouldn't say I'm a machine learning engineer by any means. I understand what the tools can do, I have a good understanding of their limitations, I understand the cost, and then I can work with engineers on how to map that to a particular customer solution.
Lumen5 is a weird one where our product wasn't the video creator, our product is the video itself. That is why the editor work was mostly about taking decisions away: try not to introduce these new concepts that add burden for people, and instead see if we can just solve those problems transparently.
Open the interactive demo →Monetization
From the early days, I was responsible for our tiers of plans. As we incorporated new AI features that are expensive and we can't offer on an unlimited basis, I led the architecture of two of those. What we would try to move towards as much as possible is something gated on the end of the value proposition, so anything you did to get there was included for free.
Enterprise
To sell to enterprise meant not really building video creation features. It was team management and SSO and security and compliance stuff and custom templates so that people would stay on brand. So it felt counterintuitive at the time, as a video creation tool, to not work on video creation features for a pretty significant amount of time. But ultimately that really paid off.
Product marketing
As a small company, we didn't have a very strong product marketing team, so I would have to wear that hat at times. Owning the product and being in the field telling the story of it was a part of the job I never fully handed off.
What I've been building
hired.run
Tons of people are using AI to apply to more jobs with less work. I'm using it to apply to fewer jobs with more focus. It reads my inbox, scores each role against a rubric I wrote, and keeps a Notion board current. It doesn't write anything and it never applies for me.
Mind the Gap
I'm a big transit buff. In another lifetime I would have been a city planner, so I built a tool that looks at a city and finds areas of high density with low transit coverage. 3,590 neighbourhoods scored, 67,000 residents in the gaps, shipped solo in a few days.
Transcript editor
One idea I validated on my own, a transcript-based approach to editing videos, became the foundation of our video creator UX for years to come. I rebuilt it as a live demo you can play with: scenes timed to words, click any word to jump there.
FleetPulse
I'm a transit nerd, and the part I find most interesting is the unglamorous half: the buses that have to be somewhere at 6am, and the people keeping them running. FleetPulse is the dashboard I'd want for that job. 300 buses across two garages, what's on the road right now, which maintenance is about to become a problem, and every open work order in one place. Built on real Transitland data, though it's a concept rather than something anyone runs on.
The route here
Apple
2010–2013 · GeniusIn-person support and repair at the Genius Bar. I became Canada's first dedicated iPhone technician within three months, and later Canada's first part-time Genius.
Hootsuite
2013–2014 · Lead Customer AdvocateI had the highest daily response volume and satisfaction scores on the team. I was promoted to lead within nine months.
Baremetrics
2014–2018 · Customer Success & MarketingIf you were an indie founder in the mid-2010s building on Stripe, you probably used Baremetrics. I built the entire customer success infrastructure and curriculum from scratch: a self-serve learning portal, automated onboarding emails, educational videos, and hands-on training sessions for founders.
Lumen5
2018–2026 · CS → PM → Senior PM → Head of ProductI joined as employee 9, a jack-of-all-trades business hire, and moved into product as we scaled. We started with no product managers. I don't even think we knew what a product manager was in the early days, and then we were like, hey, we need one of those, so I took that on. Head of Product at a company this size meant 60-70% of my time on day-to-day PM work (I always PM'd at least one or two teams), and the rest on strategy and managing a few PMs and product designers, two of whom I helped grow from intermediate to senior.
I never stopped doing IC work: I owned a core team's roadmap and backlog throughout, writing user stories, defining acceptance criteria, and staying close to the details of what shipped. In product I covered a lot of range: running a two-person growth squad, PMing up to two teams at once, and validating new ideas on my own or with a single developer.
Dispatches
Automating support and onboarding with Intercom
2017A field guide from my Baremetrics years, written for the Baremetrics blog. I was automating customer success eight years before people started talking about agents.
Read it ↗On camera for a Lumen5 launch
VideoMe on camera, walking through a new Lumen5 feature. I love to talk about the products I love.