It’s been almost six months since I joined the Apollo team at Adobe. In that six months I’ve seen the excitement around Apollo grow from ‘huge’ to ‘overwhelming’. I’ve traveled over 50,000 miles since January meeting with customers, press, and analysts from all over the world. My fellow Apollo product manager, Luis Polanco, and I have been pulled in dozens of different directions dealing with everything from product definition to press interviews. In that time, I tended to focus on more of the external facing activities while Luis focused more in internal facing activities. With the growing interest in Apollo and the impending release scheduled for later this year, we finally decided that we needed more help.

So we decided to put together a new team at Adobe called the Platform Evangelism team, which I was asked to build and manage. The team will be a component of the Apollo product management and product marketing organization and will focus primarily on all of the external facing activities revolving around Apollo. Over time we will also focus on evangelizing the Flash Player, but our primary focus over the next year will be Apollo (and all of the tools, servers, frameworks, and services that revolve around it).

I’m in the process of building out the team with evangelists in North America and a few other key regions around the world (job listings here). These evangelists will be a unique bread of savvy technical experts who have great presentation and communication skills.

The most exciting news is that I’ve already found two of the best and brightest evangelists that I know. Starting next week, Danny Dura and Kevin Hoyt will be joining the Platform Evangelism team. These two guys will be vital to making Apollo successful and I’m really happy that they’re coming on board.

We have a pretty full schedule of events and customer engagements over the next few months but the team will be very active in the community and will regularly be updating everyone on what we’re doing and where we’re doing it.

We’re also bringing on another product manager for Apollo to backfill my old position. We’re still finalizing this so I will do another post whenever it is confirmed.

While I’m on the subject of growing the Apollo team, I’ll also point out two other open positions:
- Sr. Product Manager, Platform Monetization for Apollo
- Director of Platform Product Management

This is the most exciting time yet to be working in this industry. Flex has been gaining momentum like crazy, Flash CS3 just shipped and is getting rave reviews, and I really think Apollo has the potential to change everything. We have a lot of work to do before we get it out the door, but I can’t imagine anything that I’d rather be doing right now.

If you’re at Microsoft’s MIX conference in Las Vegas next week keep an eye out for myself and Mike Chambers. We’ll be there scoping out the competition and ‘mixing’ with Microsoft developers. Make sure you grab us and say ‘hi.’ If you’re interested in joining the Platform Evangelism team, send me an email and a resume (mdowney@adobe.com).

Mike Downey | Group Manager, Platform Evangelism

Last week I had the opportunity to sit down with Robert Scoble of Podtech.net to talk about Apollo. Robert asked some good questions and was able to pull a few things out of me that I may not have disclosed publicly before.

At one point I actually forgot his question in the middle of my answer and struggled to stall while I tried to remember what the question was. You can see me turning red. Luckily I recovered and I don’t think it’s that noticeable.

Visit Robert’s page to see interviews with Richard Galvan talking about Flash CS3 Professional as well as Kenneth Berger talking about Dreamweaver CS3.