@Dread First
I can't quote, but this:
SQL, Python and R skills in a marketing manager probably means they want someone with some data science experience to turn their Google Analytics into a business plan and product roadmap.
That is
plausible, but there's a problem with this scenario that I'm sensing here:
I don't think data scientists and senior marketing staff share much (if any) overlap.
No matter what profession you're in, it is the marketing team's job to convince their target consumer demographic by any means necessary to buy the product. This imperative to "sell, sell, sell!" clashes directly with the operations staff (correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm quite sure that data scientists are lumped in with operations staff in their labs).
Marketing teams are often far too busy canvassing leads and closing sales to properly get involved on the operations side of things. Senior marketing staff (as a rule of thumb) would only get involved on the operations side of things when the situation requires it. This often means that marketing team overpromised, the operations team underdelivered, and now both sides are pointing the finger at each other over the disaster that occurred. Either that, or there's important business that
must be properly instructed to operations staff to avoid risk of miscommunication.
I just cannot see
anyone who's literate in Rust, Python, or SQL make a good senior marketing staff member. Knowing the operations side of things intimately often results in you downplaying key selling points of the products with legitimate technicalities that marketing staff neglected to mention. The honest salesman never got anywhere for a reason.
I must point out this is all speculation on my part; I will defer to anyone else who has tangible experience in this industry who says to the contrary.
People mentioned before that Honeycomb's product is good but limited, and exists in a sea of competitors that work as well, if not better, and come with far more features. Given the listings looking for 'product discovery', 'conversion optimization', and 'customer insight', they don't have a lot of clients, don't know where to find them, or what features would attract them. Maybe the plan was to get bought out before now.

but I'm positive that Honeycomb won't enjoy any tangible successes during this fiscal year. At best, they'll stagnate across all four quarters of this year.
A "good but limited" product is not a product worth investing in, not when we're well into a recession (despite the federal government's insistence to the contrary). "Good but limited" implies that the product is a perfect fit if you're willing to invest time, money, and energy into making the product work for you. If the economy's doing well enough and capital flows freely, the "good but limited" product will easily be a success because it can (presumably) be sold for cheaper erstwhile leaving you with room to monetise things that your product can't do. Tech layoffs and aggressive interest rate hikes seemingly indicate that
the last thing any rational enterprise wants to do is waste money on a partially-functional product.
I'll concede that I'm heavily biased against Elliot and Honeycomb; I'll also point out that I'm not well-versed in all this "observability" crap so I could be way off base here. But everything you listed just points out (to me) that they don't have any product worth pitching.
Their tags (at a glance) imply that things like "product discovery," "conversion optimisation," and "customer insight" are things that any fucking rube could learn off of a Skillshare (or a Coursera/EDX class) and get some handy certificate proving they can do the thing.
As for their lack of clients? Blame Elliot for publicly parading #DropKiwiFarms on all the spaces he used in any professional capacity. It's easy to forget due to all the lunacy that happened between August and October, but people on LinkedIn
have pointed out that they're aware of "consent accidents" being tied to Elliot, and Honeycomb by extension. Not helping matters any is how Elliot proudly features his targeted harassment of T1 ISP infrastructure providers for all to see on his
public profile.
If, and I do mean
if, Honeycomb ever had a worthwhile product worth peddling at any point in the past, Elliot singlehandedly ruined any chance of that product being able to grow into something better. His autoimmune tunnel vision made damn sure about that.