Stephanie Richardson: Place your bets

Me, You and Palm: Profiles of Palm People
	Role: Are we building what you want? Are you wanting what we're making? Product marketing is the art of placing bets on what you're going to love.   At Palm since: Just before we launched the Treo 700p. Seems like forever ago
I have always been a person who’s full of questions, ideas, and opinions. From choreographing group dances to “Billy Jean” as a kid (come on girls, we all did it) to planning road trips in college, I love getting people aligned and working together toward one goal…kinda like herding cats. (Remember that TV ad? Yeah, that’s me on the horse.)   You are not an easy audience to please. I’m always trying to figure out what you’re going to love about your phone, not what we love about it. Because sometimes those two things are different.   Palm is full of people who just want to do the right thing. Maybe that sounds obvious, but it’s not. Everyone here wants to deliver the right product, in the right way, to the right people.

  

Jan. 8, 2009 – the day we announced the Palm webOS platform and the Palm Pre phone at an invite-only event at CES in Las Vegas. And probably one of the best – and most nerve-racking – days in my career to date. The event went amazingly well, but for those of us who have been working on this product for what seems like forever, the jittery behind-the-scenes went very much like this:

Jan. 7: Rehearse the presentation and demo, worry about everything going as planned, rehearse some more, worry about what people will think, rehearse some more, worry about everything from someone stealing the demo devices to the power going out in Vegas. Followed by a completely sleepless night.

Jan. 8, before the morning press conference: Cross fingers and toes, realizing that there isn’t anything we can do at this point. It will be what it will be, and we hope it will be great.

Jan. 8, during the press conference: Jumping around in our seats at first, huge sigh of relief when Jon Rubinstein came on stage and it all started. More relief when Ed Colligan came on stage – so far so good. Extreme relief and now nervous excitement as Matias Duarte went through the demo and everyone ooohed and aaahed right where we’d hoped they would.

Jan. 9: 3,465 (or thereabouts) demos later, sore feet and throats from talking for hours on end – and enormous pride that everyone loved the product and everything went off without a hitch.

Talk about placing your bets. A really great day.

Join Stephanie on a Facebook discussion board all this week and find out if her betting skills were any help at the Blackjack table in Vegas.

Comments

[Bevan Archer]

It's hard to tell from the picture, but I think Stephanie might have been the demo-er that I was watching in the room at CES. I was excited before I got there, and even more so afterwords. I can't wait for the release!!

[Andre Corbeil]

Hello again,

In deciding to wait for the Pre or go with an iPhone, I'm wondering if the Pre, through the Cloud will sync with MobileMe. Logically it is just another source of data that I could provide login/password for, but this is significant enough of a concern to knock the Pre out of the running if its a no.

Thanks for your time.

Andre