Recently, we produced episode 4 of the alignment webinar, our webinar series for global products (watch all episodes). We'll be publishing more blogs talking about what we heard from the amazing panellists – but we wanted to reshare some of what we learned.
But here, we wanted to revisit some of the points made by Horatiu, the Global App Testing speaker. Horatiu works on some of GAT's very biggest accounts, meaning that his work is to help collect data for many of the apps in your pockets.
1. Effectiveness means thinking about data's "job"
A lesson from Horatiu Ionut Marc, Senior Project Manager at Global App Testing, was how to boost the salience of data insights.
Too often, when a team has an insight, they fail to successfully sell it across the business. Localization professionals struggle to persuade product professionals to plan from day one with international users in mind, for example. And when you've done research, it's easy to let that data go ignored.
The advice from our speaker was simple:
"The way we solved this at GAT is essentially better and deeper listening. Starting point has to be listening rather than telling, and that when you ‘re looking for data you need to be looking for things which directly apply to the workflows and processes of your data customers and stakeholders.
"We’ve retargeted our testers to keep suggesting data which we think is going to have the biggest impact based on a continuously evolving picture of client priorities; and we’ve worked very hard to become client focused because that’s the way that user data can have impact."
2. Communicate upwards with data that relates to value
Miguel Sepulveda (yolocalizo) 🎮✏️🌍 , the Director of Globalization at King Gaming, argued that you need to reframe your data – and look for metrics which relate to value.
Miguel drew a distinction between operational and strategic KPIs. Miguel argued that loc teams are predisposed to focus on operational KPIs which can speak to a process effectiveness but not analyse the actual ROI of localization.
But refocusing on value not only means you'll be able to drive more effectiveness, but sell your work better upwards.
Miguel explains:
"We need to move forward and move towards demonstrating growth which is the key to effectively communicating our team value to senior management. Those are metrics that we track and report to leadership. Growth
To be more specific, some metrics which fall under this category and can help explain the added value are... the average revenue per customer, or customer retention rates per market, or monthly and daily active users by country. These metrics demonstrate how you contribute to the company's overall objectives."
3. User research can provide some counter-intuitive results. That's one good reason to do it more
Rieko Knickerbocker, the Senior Localization Project Manager at Slack, talked about her experience translating Slack into Japanese, and there was one example of a finding she didn't expect:
"When the text is 100% translated into Japanese without any English words, [Japanese] users said it didn't feel native and natural. In Japan, some words normally stay in English, especially in software. When those are translated, they feel as though it's translated text... so I left more words in English intentionally."
Good research can produce surprising results. Which is one reason to do it!
Watch the full episode below: