Product marketing, from zero
For years, Lumen5's product marketing was Kaegan, in the gaps between PM work. Then he made the case that it shouldn't be, and hired the function into existence.
The setup
Early-stage companies don't skip product marketing. They just do it without noticing, badly or otherwise. At Lumen5 the work landed on Kaegan: landing pages, launch emails, social posts, plans and pricing. A team of one, running in the margins of a PM job. His own summary of the arc:
I was also responsible for product marketing my entire time there in various forms. In the early days, I ran product launches end-to-end, creating collateral and reporting on outcomes. Later I was a player-coach: I would mentor our PMM, do training sessions with sales and CX for new features, and act as the project manager for launches. Owning the product and being in the field telling the story of it was a part of the job I never fully handed off.
That era taught him the craft the honest way. You learn positioning fast when you're also the person writing the landing page that has to convert.
What he owned
- The team-of-one era: landing pages, launch emails, social, and the plans and pricing pages, built and shipped himself.
- The launch engine: release notes, walkthrough videos, emails, and social for three to four launches a quarter, every quarter.
- Enablement as part of every launch: training sessions with CS and sales so they could speak to new features with confidence, not a day after launch. During it.
- The camera work. He presented launches on video himself when the feature deserved a face (there's one in the dispatches).
- The case to stop doing it alone: he identified product marketing as a gap, made the hiring case, then helped hire and mentor the PMM who built it into a real function.
- The player-coach era that followed: mentoring the PMM, project-managing launches, and staying hands-on where it counted.
How it played out
Lumen5 went from a PMM-shaped hole to a function with a real owner, and Kaegan moved from doing the work to coaching it, while keeping a hand in. He still ran launch project management and did the sales and CX training sessions himself.
It made him the cross-functional bridge between product, engineering, sales, and marketing, and the glue between GTM and CS in particular, which mattered most while the company was pivoting from self-serve SMB to Enterprise. Product marketing is how he ended up in that position, and he never really left it.
It's also why he doesn't treat product and product marketing as separate careers. The best positioning work he's done came from knowing exactly what the product could do, and the best product decisions came from knowing exactly how they'd be told.