The Profile
She didn't study code.
She studies the people who do.
Justine Davis graduated from the University of Arizona in 2009 with a degree in Regional Development - not computer science, not marketing, not anything that obviously leads to running developer relations at one of the largest enterprise software companies on earth. That non-linear path is part of the story. The rest is watching her work.
Today, Davis is the VP of Developer Marketing, Community, and Developer Relations at ServiceNow. Her brief covers a lot of territory: she shapes how ServiceNow positions itself as a developer platform, runs executive keynotes, manages the strategic narrative behind major product launches, and oversees the ServiceNow developer community - a group now exceeding one million members. The number is worth noting, but Davis focuses more on what that community does than how big it is. "People who actually show up for each other" is how she describes it. That's the bar.
"In product is good, but only if it is helpful. Do not make your product Times Square."- Justine Davis, Sharebird AMA
From Hotwire to 1M Developers
The career arc that led here started in hospitality. Before tech had taken over everything, Davis worked in marketing at Marriott International, then moved into online marketing at Hotwire - a travel brand where the challenge was convincing people to book a flight to somewhere they already wanted to go, not explaining what a build pipeline is. It was direct-response marketing in its most unambiguous form: click, book, done. That discipline - measuring what works, cutting what doesn't - followed her into every role she'd hold afterward.
The turn toward tech came via UniversityNow, an early online education company, where Davis ran user acquisition. By December 2014, she had landed at Atlassian, a company that was in the middle of making DevOps legible to the enterprise. She joined to work on Bitbucket - Atlassian's Git hosting product - and would stay for over nine years. She grew from Senior Product Marketing Manager to VP/Head of Product Marketing for Agile and DevOps Solutions. If you've ever watched a keynote at Atlassian Team '22 or Team '23 and thought the developer message landed more clearly than you expected, there's a good chance you were watching something she helped build.
"Devs really like to be shown as opposed to be told. Don't create sales decks - instead, take to social media, build smaller feature videos based on each problem."- Justine Davis, on Developer Marketing
The Postman Chapter
After nearly a decade at Atlassian, Davis moved to Postman as Head of Marketing in early 2024. Postman - the API platform used by roughly 30 million developers worldwide - is one of the few companies where "developer marketing" isn't just a job title but actually the entire marketing motion. The tenure was brief but meaningful. She was on stage at POST/CON 25 in Los Angeles, co-keynoting with CEO Abhinav Asthana on APIs in the age of autonomous agents and generative AI. She also sat for a fireside chat with Ryan Reynolds - an event that said something about where developer conferences were going, blending technical credibility with cultural reach in ways that would have seemed unusual even five years ago.
The move to ServiceNow followed. At a company with 27,000 employees, annual revenues approaching $13 billion, and a platform that runs a significant chunk of enterprise IT operations worldwide, the developer community isn't a side channel. It's infrastructure for growth. Davis now runs it.
The Playbook, Stated Plainly
In a 2024 Sharebird AMA on developer product marketing, Davis laid out a framework that's become something of a reference document for anyone in the field. On the question of enterprise developer marketing, her answer cuts through the usual ambiguity: developers are not your buyer. They are influential - very - but the buying decision sits elsewhere in the org chart. Confusing influence for purchase authority is how developer campaigns get misallocated and then blamed for not converting.
On video strategy, she brings the same data-first thinking: roughly 50% of viewers watch videos under five minutes to completion, 38% for videos over five minutes, and only 16% for hour-long content. She recommends placing call-to-action buttons at the 10% mark. These aren't abstract principles. They're numbers she's tested across years of content production for developer audiences.
"Reddit is a gold mine but you cannot just pop in to Reddit... Only then can you earn enough credit to post your content on developer channels."- Justine Davis
DevRel vs. Developer Marketing
One of the persistent confusions in the developer marketing world is the line between Developer Relations (DevRel) and Developer Marketing. Davis has a clear answer: they're "two sides of the same coin." In her framing, DevRel owns the truly technical content - documentation, tutorials, code samples, community contributions. Developer Marketing builds the motion around that content: the narrative, the campaigns, the go-to-market. Neither works without the other, and treating them as redundant or interchangeable is how companies end up with content that developers don't trust and marketing that developers ignore.
She now runs both at ServiceNow - a structural choice that means the two functions share a single point of accountability. Whether that consolidation holds as the company scales is a live experiment. The community's engagement numbers suggest it's working so far.
The Scottsdale Variable
Davis is based in Scottsdale, Arizona - a detail that matters less for geography and more for what it says about how distributed leadership works at enterprise companies today. The VP running ServiceNow's global developer community is not in the Bay Area, not in Austin, not in New York. She's in the Southwest, leading a team that operates across time zones, platforms, and sub-communities. It's a quiet indicator of how talent gravity has shifted in the post-2020 enterprise world.
Outside of work, she's an avid reader and describes herself as consistently chasing her Apple Watch move goal. Both habits - reading widely, measuring daily - fit the profile of someone who has spent a career building intuition from signals that other people miss.