A true story, still being written

Complicated products don’t sell themselves. Someone has to tell the story.

I’m Tye Davis, and that someone has been me for some of the hardest products to explain in tech: DevOps platforms, identity governance, feature flags, and now AI security. Along the way I also founded two companies, one of which started with a pitch on Shark Tank.

Start the story ↓ Skip to the proof

Currently Director of Product Marketing at Noma Security.

Tye DavisProduct marketer.
Founder. Dad.

Now: securing AI at Noma

The road so far

Six stops. Each one taught the next one something.

The start

HP / HPE

Enterprise software, enterprise scale. Where the fundamentals came from.

The IPO years

GitLab

A single product becomes the DevOps Platform, and then a public company.

The detour

MuteMe

A side idea walks onto Shark Tank and into Staples stores nationwide.

In parallel

Willow+Co

A baby brand built from scratch to seven figures, no shortcuts.

The craft years

Harness → LaunchDarkly

Positioning, demos, and competitive intelligence as a revenue system.

Now

Noma Security

The AI chapter. Same job, newest technology.

My story

It makes sense in hindsight. It didn’t at the time.

Careers look like plans when you read them backwards. Here is mine forwards, in four chapters.

Chapter one

Learning how big software actually sells

I started in enterprise software at HP and HPE, where products are sold in committee and stories have to survive procurement. Then came GitLab, and everything sped up. The product was growing faster than the story around it, while GitHub and Atlassian told simpler ones.

My job was the connective tissue: competitive intelligence that fed real decisions, demos that solution engineers could run anywhere in the world, and one clear idea, a single DevOps platform instead of a shelf of tools, repeated until analysts and buyers repeated it back. GitLab reached the Gartner Magic Quadrant, then the IPO.

The GitLab case study

Chapter two

A button walks into the Shark Tank

Remote work had a problem nobody had named: nobody knew if you were muted, including you. MuteMe was a physical button that glowed red or green so there was no doubt. Simple product. Hard part was everything else: brand, pricing, a Kickstarter, retail packaging, and a story strong enough for national TV.

It worked. The pitch aired on Shark Tank, the button landed in Staples nationwide and on desks at Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Intel, and a prototype became a business that sold more than 100,000 units. Founding it changed my marketing forever. When it is your money, you find out fast which messages sell.

The MuteMe case study

Chapter three

The brand built from a standing start

Willow+Co had no audience, no retail partners, and no ad budget worth mentioning. What it had was a good product and a community that formed around it. We grew it the slow, compounding way: creators and customers instead of campaigns, direct sales plus wholesale, and product decisions made by listening harder than competitors did.

Seven figures later, it is still my favorite proof of a belief I run on: story plus community beats spend, especially when you do not have spend.

The Willow+Co case study

Chapter four · now

The AI chapter

After the founder years, I went back to the craft with sharper instincts: technical marketing at ConductorOne for identity governance, product marketing at Harness, and competitive intelligence at LaunchDarkly, where the program I built scaled to more than 200 sales reps and turned win/loss truth into positioning.

Now I lead product marketing at Noma Security, telling the story of securing AI: the newest technology, the same human problem. Buyers cannot buy what they cannot understand yet. That translation work is the thread through every chapter above.

The LaunchDarkly case study

Stories

Pick a story. Any story.

The short versions live here. Each one opens into the full case study below.

GitLab · IPO era

How a tool became a category

A single product, a crowded market, and a platform story the whole company could tell.

Read the full case study ↓

MuteMe · Founder

Prototype to national retail in 12 months

Shark Tank, Staples, and 100,000+ units, from an idea about a glowing button.

Read the full case study ↓

Willow+Co · Founder

Seven figures, no ad budget

A baby brand grown by community and creators while competitors bought attention.

Read the full case study ↓

LaunchDarkly · Competitive

CI that sales actually used

Win/loss truth, AI-assisted battlecards, and a program scaled to 200+ reps.

Read the full case study ↓

ConductorOne · Technical marketing

Identity governance, in plain English

Making a product everyone needs and nobody shops for feel obvious.

Read the full case study ↓

Case studies

The stories, with the receipts.

Short versions of each full case study. The long versions live one click away.

GitLab: the category years

Manager, Technical Marketing

GitLab was expanding from one product into a platform while competing with GitHub, Atlassian, and every point tool on the shelf. The challenge was clarity: one story that product, sales, engineers, and analysts could all carry.

I built the competitive intelligence engine, the scenario demo strategy used by solution engineers globally, and helped shape the DevOps Platform category narrative through hypergrowth and analyst scrutiny.

Read the full case study →

IPO

GTM through the road to public

Category leader

DevOps Platform, analyst recognised

Global

Demos and SE enablement, worldwide

MuteMe: zero to national retail

Founder

A new hardware category with no budget and no permission to exist. I led brand, positioning, and the full go-to-market: direct launch, Kickstarter, creators and PR, then the retail pitch and packaging that put MuteMe into Staples across the country.

The Shark Tank appearance turned a clever button into a known product overnight, and enterprise teams at Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Intel put it on their desks.

Read the full case study →

$2M+

Within the first two years

100k+

Units sold

National

Retail distribution via Staples

LaunchDarkly: differentiation under pressure

Manager, Competitive Intelligence

Developer-first challengers were winning attention and some deals. LaunchDarkly needed its enterprise story sharpened and its field team armed with intelligence that was current, honest, and usable mid-deal.

I strengthened the differentiation narrative and built the competitive program, including the win/loss work with Hindsight that scaled to 200+ reps. It is the same playbook I advise on today, and the one I now run in AI security at Noma.

Read the full case study →

200+

Sales reps enabled on CI

AI-assisted

Battlecards and live intelligence

Advisor

To Hindsight, the win/loss platform

Willow+Co: built from scratch

Founder

A modern baby brand with no shortcuts available. Product, brand, and marketing built together, sold direct and wholesale, grown by community and creator partnerships instead of paid campaigns.

Read the full case study →

7 figures

Built from a standing start

DTC + wholesale

Two engines, one brand

ConductorOne: plain-English identity

Director, Technical Marketing

Identity governance is essential and unglamorous, which makes narrative the whole game. I directed technical marketing that made automation tangible through demos and a story enterprise buyers could act on.

Read the full case study →

Demo-led

GTM built around showing, not telling

Enterprise

GTM foundations for scale

How I work

Every chapter ran on the same four steps.

Find the story

Interview customers, study competitors, read the product honestly. Somewhere in there is the sentence the market will repeat.

Make it provable

Turn the claim into a demo, a proof point, a number. If it cannot be shown, it gets rewritten until it can.

Launch the system

Audience, narrative, enablement, and demand, launched together and owned after launch day, not just on it.

Learn what sold

Win/loss and customer truth flow back into product and messaging. The story gets sharper every quarter.

1 IPO

GitLab, with the platform story intact

100k+

MuteMe units sold after Shark Tank

200+

Reps running my CI at LaunchDarkly

7 figures

Willow+Co, built from zero

Your product could be the next chapter.

If you are building something technical and the story is not landing yet, for a team, as an advisor, or from a stage, I would like to hear about it.

tyegdavis@gmail.com LinkedIn ↗