When Chris Repetto needed a way to explain enterprise software, he went to the North Pole. His project, SantaBase Saves Christmas, used a familiar seasonal idea to bring Intuit’s QuickBase to life. The product helped teams work more efficiently. Christmas supplied a setting people could picture before anyone had to explain a database.
It is a small, revealing entry in a communications career. Enterprise software can be a difficult dinner guest: useful, full of possibilities, and inclined to explain itself at considerable length. A recognizable story gives the listener somewhere to begin. Santa already has a deadline. There is no need for a slide explaining why December 25 matters.
Repetto’s public career includes years of explaining software, working with employees through organizational change, helping speakers refine their message, and taking on a communications assignment at Attentive. His career has also brought him to Johnson & Johnson. The settings vary. The person receiving the message remains central.
The years of explaining the software
In January 2002, Repetto appeared as an Intuit spokesperson in coverage of a Quicken and TurboTax promotion for Mac users. The details were ordinary and useful: a rebate, eligible products, a deadline. Communications at that level has a straightforward test. Can someone work out whether the offer applies to them?
Two years later, the subject was less cheerful. Intuit was retiring older Quicken versions, and customers were unhappy about losing support for online features. Repetto, identified as a public relations manager for Quicken, explained that providing data feeds cost money and competed with spending on new products. Explaining a decision does not guarantee that the people affected will enjoy it.
Those assignments show two sides of the work. Sometimes a company needs to make an offer clear. Sometimes it needs to explain a trade-off to people who would prefer a different decision. A cheerful adjective has limited usefulness in the second situation. The practical details have to carry the argument.
By 2014, Repetto was speaking as Communications Director for Intuit’s Accountant and Advisor Group about the move toward online accounting. His comments welcomed competition and emphasized customer feedback and frequent improvements. In 2015, he was listed alongside Joe Woodard and Kim Amsbaugh for a QB Power Hour session about the future of accounting firms.
Software had moved from a purchase on a shelf toward a continuing relationship online. The communications assignment moved with it: explain what is changing, why it matters, and what a customer can do next. The questions are modest enough to fit on an index card. Answering them well takes rather more work.
Then Repetto had his own change to explain. After 17 years at Intuit, he told his professional network that his Global Communications Director position had been relocated to Mountain View, California. He would be looking for a new opportunity. He asked people to keep an eye out.
The post gave readers something they could act on. It stated the change and made a request. After a long stretch of helping a company speak, Repetto was speaking for himself. A career transition can require a great deal of private thought. The public message can still be a few clear sentences.
Seven countries, one conversation
Near the end of his Intuit years, Repetto offered a concrete account of the team behind the announcements. In a March 2017 discussion of distributed work, he described managing 14 people and two agencies across seven countries. The numbers tell a different story from the image of a lone spokesperson answering a reporter’s question.
“I currently manage 14 people and two agencies across seven countries.”
Chris Repetto, discussing his Intuit team in 2017
His approach was to find substantial initiatives that people could work on together, despite their different regional priorities. Shared assignments let team members contribute their perspectives and extend their work beyond their own market. Coordination had a purpose beyond keeping the calendar tidy.
There is a useful distinction between having colleagues in several countries and giving those colleagues work that connects them. A list of locations describes an arrangement. A shared assignment creates reasons to speak, compare assumptions and make decisions together. Repetto’s published advice puts attention on the work that makes a team feel like a team.
When the room gets three times bigger
At Prudential, the audience itself changed size. The Enabling Solutions organization expanded from 500 people to 1,500 as part of its One Front Door initiative. It covered three time zones and 14 office locations, with more remote workers and seasonal or hourly employees in contact centers.
The communications team responded with podcasts, animated videos, monthly pulse checks and focus groups. It tracked use of content hosted on SharePoint and rethought its leadership town hall. Repetto was among the members named when the team received Internal Communications Team of the Year recognition in Ragan’s 2019 awards cycle.
The recognition belongs to a team, and the problem explains why teamwork mattered. Different schedules and working arrangements make a single delivery method less convenient. A leader can address a room while employees elsewhere are serving customers or working another shift. The message needs a way to reach those people, too.
Feedback is part of that design. Pulse checks and focus groups give employees a route back into the conversation. Counting what a company sends is easy. Learning how people receive it asks for more curiosity. The award-winning work joined delivery with listening.
Give the slides less to do
Repetto’s own writing turns to the same concern from the speaker’s side. In January 2018, he published If You Want to Inspire Your Listeners, Find Your Authentic Voice. He considered Martin Luther King Jr.’s speaking as a lesson in connecting with an audience, then offered practical advice for executives and communicators.
He urged presenters to consider their listeners’ concerns, prepare thoroughly and use visual material to support the spoken argument. He also discussed anaphora, the repetition of a phrase at the beginning of successive sentences. Structure can help an audience follow and remember a thought.
In the essay, Repetto recalled an unnamed executive who wanted customer photographs as prompts for a presentation. The pictures gave the executive a way to explain business strategy through the problems the company was helping customers solve. The people in the photographs supplied a reason for the strategy to exist.
That is a useful test for a deck. If the speaker and slide are competing to deliver the same paragraph, the audience has been given two reading assignments at once. A photograph can leave room for the speaker to explain the connection. Preparation earns that freedom; fewer words on the screen need not mean less thought behind them.
What does the listener need to understand before the next slide?
The work before the microphone
At Indigo Ag, Repetto’s work included communications around a business combining agriculture, science and technology. He was listed as the media contact when the company announced Erin Bakst as Chief People Officer in 2023. A press announcement makes one piece of that work visible. Colleagues describe another.
A.J. Kumar has credited Repetto among the people who helped hone his messaging, describing the feedback as clear and kind. Kumar’s account places him within a group of advisers and collaborators, rather than assigning the preparation to one person. A public talk can carry the work of several people before the speaker reaches the microphone.
Bakst’s public recommendation describes Repetto as calm and thoughtful in crises, with an ability to build relationships across the organization. Former colleague Emily Brutti also describes collaboration and consistent messaging. These are colleagues’ assessments, offered by people who worked with him.
Clear and kind is a particularly useful combination in feedback. Clarity tells a speaker what needs attention. Kindness makes it easier to return to the draft and do the work. Neither requires pretending a confusing sentence is ready for an audience.
A new brief, a familiar question
Repetto described his Attentive assignment as a full-time consultancy focused on external communications and media strategy. The brief included executive visibility, corporate storytelling and messaging. His name appears as the press contact on the company’s announcements in January and April 2025.
The company had several things to explain. In January, Attentive announced that it had passed $500 million in annual recurring revenue during 2024 and discussed work with Google on Rich Communication Services, or RCS. In April, it announced another event with Google about mobile brand communication.
Those are company developments. Repetto’s documented connection is the communications assignment: help explain the business, its executives and its products. Keeping that connection precise makes the work easier to understand. A revenue milestone belongs to the company; communicating why it matters is an assignment of its own.
On April 10, 2025, he shared Attentive’s consumer research on personalized marketing. It brings the career back to the receiving end of a message. A company may have software, data, a presentation and a carefully arranged announcement. The person listening still decides whether any of it deserves attention.
SantaBase gave enterprise software a recognizable setting. Shared projects connected a distributed team. New formats helped a growing employee audience hear from leaders. Coaching helped a speaker refine a message. Repetto’s career offers these specific examples of making communications work for the people who receive it. The North Pole was one place to start. The listener was always the destination.