Ryan K. McDonald, Senior Platform Product Manager

Case studies

The problem, the work, the number

01 · SPLUNK

12%

adoption increase across 2,000+ enterprise customers

Splunk · Senior Product Manager · 2022–2024

Security teams managed detections in CI/CD pipelines outside the platform, then pushed them back in. The roadmap kept answering with more content.

What I did

Rebuilt the roadmap around version control and content management that fit the CI/CD workflows customers already used. Onboarding fell from 10 weeks to 3 and a business case to leadership unlocked $500K in platform funding.

Read the Splunk case study →

02 · BANK OF AMERICA

$60K/mo

in coordination overhead removed from the Omni-SIEM migration

Bank of America · Senior PM, contract · 2025–2026

Six months in, the program had produced zero detections and had no shared roadmap. Ownership was split across security ops, engineering and compliance, and teams tracked capabilities instead of outcomes.

What I did

Restructured decision rights, separated detection research from production commitments and set one Splunk and Anvilogic migration sequence. All three organizations signed off on the same roadmap for the first time.

Read the BofA case study →

03 · CHECK-IN BY ASCENDVENT

Live

free up to 3 clients, Pro $40/month for unlimited clients

Ascendvent · Founder & Product Lead · 2024–Present

Coaches often reconstruct what happened between sessions from messages, notes and memory. Client updates and open commitments are scattered, leaving the coach to piece them together before the next conversation.

What I did

Check-In drafts the email from the client's goals and commitments. The coach reviews it, edits it if needed and approves it before the client receives it. Check-In brings the client's response and open commitments together for the coach to review before the next conversation.

Read the Check-In case study →

04 · YAHOO EDGECAST

+35%

engagement lift from session-based playback

Yahoo Edgecast · Senior Technical PM · 2021–2022

Through two acquisitions, enterprise customers still wanted pause, rewind and replay. Persistent DVR storage made the obvious answer too costly to ship.

What I did

Shipped session-based playback on session caching instead of persistent DVR storage. Engagement rose 35% within months and cloud storage costs fell 18%.

Read the Edgecast case study →

Advisory, quietly

Ascendvent · est. 2024

Alongside product roles, I run Ascendvent, where the advisory work lives. The offer is narrow: AI ship-readiness evals for B2B SaaS teams. I find the failures your AI feature will have in production before your customers do, and leave you the harness that keeps finding them.

Check-In by Ascendvent: AI-drafted follow-ups for coach approval, with pre-session briefs. checkin.ascendvent.life →

More at ascendvent.life →