Introducing our new VP Marketing, Jo Ann Sanders

On behalf of Honeycomb, I’m delighted to announce that Jo Ann Sanders has joined us as our new VP of Marketing. Jo Ann is poised to help usher in our next phase of growth as the observability market continues to expand.

As two engineers turned co-founders, Charity and I have found that we often have a much harder time talking about the value of observability, compared to simply building that value. Fortunately, creating the building blocks of observability tooling has paid off substantially: our early ideas spawned an entire movement, the groundwork has been laid for observability to become its own category (👀 at Gartner, Google Cloud), and observability is now the hot topic on many people’s minds (thanks for the nod, Werner!).

Yet the value we build into the product for developers still needs a bridge into the values that align with their business. As a technical marketer with a career background in both marketing and product leadership, Jo Ann is uniquely qualified to help us build those bridges.

Most recently, Jo Ann repositioned Optimizely for developers by launching their feature flagging product and becoming a key player in the progressive delivery space. Prior to that, she was VP of Marketing at Xamarin—a mobile development and DevOps company acquired by Microsoft—where she built their marketing and DevRel organizations from scratch. Jo Ann has also held a variety of product leadership roles at companies like Adobe, where she developed the early cloud and subscription products that later became Adobe Creative Cloud.

The pool of technical marketers familiar with the developer tools arena, especially given the particular market intersections where Honeycomb sits, is small. Jo Ann is a star player in her field and we’re thrilled to welcome her aboard. It’s rare to find someone who knows how to speak to developers, build marketing programs with our authentic company voice and values, and amplify the thought leadership we’ve built throughout the years. Jo Ann will use that approach to lead our scrappy marketing team as we continue forward into a new exciting phase of growth in 2021.

Jo Ann’s marketing leadership is a sign of our commitment to continue making Honeycomb more accessible, easier to get started with, and simpler to scale to your needs. Together, we look forward to continue delighting our community, making our customers successful, and aligning developers with business needs.

Welcome, Jo Ann!