We asked 44 experts how to deliver better global products last year. Here's what they said...

Chapter 1

Building an international product strategy

Perhaps you have a fully decentralized product adapted for users in every market; perhaps you’re trying to build something globally inclusive which requires less adaptation. But choosing your markets and strategy is the first step. We heard a great deal of thinking around international product strategy based on the specific details of different products and businesses, making it challenging to generalize. But in general, experts identified that businesses failed to appreciate differences in markets sufficiently; struggled to think through full local product experiences; and didn't appreciate the role of local competitors. 

Key takeaways from chapter 1

1. Global product strategy should be a c-level concern
2. Your product is less portable than you might think
3. Focus on a few key markets and think them through
4. Listen to in-market indicators, but don’t follow them blindly
5. The framework: include, adapt, intensify
6. Graft onto local network effects

Global product strategy is a top-level concern

• Insight by Global App Testing 

Building a global commercial product strategy is very difficult and very important. 

It’s difficult because coordinating the different skills involved makes it challenging: global product teams agreed that “coordinating between teams” is the hardest problem of global product strategy in our 2023 report. It’s also difficult because teams operate in low data environments: 40% (the largest cohort) agreed that they didn’t know what impacts local metrics. (Our State of Localization Quality report) 

Excerpt from our 2023 state of localization report

It’s important because, as Brian Chesky said, you “can’t just make products for 41-year old tech founders.” Your developers are probably unlike your users, and product / market fit is core to a businesses success. It’s also important because it doesn’t happen without attention. As Doug Kim, Principal Design Manager at Microsoft said, “unless you set out to build an inclusive product, you will build an exclusive one.”

You might want your product to be global – by which we mean suitable for users around the world; or local, by which we mean adapted and highly suitable for a specific locale. But without leadership to take your product there, the outcome is likely to mean that a team will focus excessively on activity without a clear strategy in place to deliver local growth.

56% of respondents in our webinar audience poll agreed that their business was focused on “delivery” at the expense of “strategy”.

Your product is less portable than you think

• Insight from Alessandra Binazzi | Principal Consultant | Global Sights Consulting | David McNamee | Solutions Architect | Phrase

Alessandra Binazzi, Principal Consultat at Global Sights Consulting, told a story about a company she had once worked at: "At ASICS, we acquired a fitness app called Runkeeper to drive the company's digital transformation. ASICS is a Japanese company, and yet Runkeeper really struggled for a long time in Japan. When we started looking at the data, we realized our Japanese users were very different to our US users. They were more serious runners – in the US we penetrated the casual market.”

Lots of interviewees and speakers described a naivety from senior stakeholders; an assumption that domestic products can easily be remarketed to international markets.

David McNamee, Solutions Architect at Phrase, said: "I think being presumptive about portability of your own language is [the most common] pitfall of businesses trying to grow internationally. If you use one of the big global languages… we always talk about – if you use English, which English? How many Spanishes? I live in Florida – I need three.” 

Nataly Kelly, former VP of Marketing at HubSpot, argued: "When you think about finding your next million users, you do need to realize that each of these preferences has truly different needs and preferences. The sooner you begin to do that local research, the better. The big thing I talk about in my book is that users derive value differently depending on what market they're in." 

When planning, pick your markets and think them through

• Insight from Alessandra Binazzi | Principal Consultant | Global Sights Consulting |  Diego Felix Dos Santos | Director of Product Management | Mastercard | James Atkin | Senior Customer Success Manager | Global App Testing

A number of our speakers over the course of our content this year emphasized the importance of in-market competition as one of the points of difference between local users. This was particularly true of products which rely on defending a market position, or which relied heavily on networks for their viability.

Alessandra Binazzi may have been the first to say it: “Looking at local competitors can be really insightful… especially for B2B businesses.” 

But James Atkin, Global App Testing Senior Customer Success Manager, showed how this kind of thinking can impact strategy around insight. “One thing we notice across our clients is intensive testing towards desired market stage in a few of their key markets. While lots of businesses test extensively across all their markets for quality coverage, you should also identify markets to test intensively. That’s much more cost effective; as it’s cheaper to retain an established position than to create a toehold in a new market.”

Diego Santos, the Payment Product Lead at Mastercard, argued that you should set yourself failure criteria as part of a GTM: “Plan your actions in a best and worst-case scenario. Then I need to know exactly when I need to pull the plug, if I have to.” 

Listen to in-market indicators, but don't follow them without thinking

• Insight from Nataly Kelly | Independent | former VP at HubSpot

In-market indicators are some of the most important things we can think about when identifying which markets to dedicate our efforts to. It’s one of the ways businesses get pulled into participating in new markets. Leaders from a few businesses mentioned pull-factors leading their internationalization, including Slack, HubSpot, and more. But it’s possible to be too reliant on these. 

Nataly Kelly told one very valuable story: “I’ve seen companies over-rely on market pull signals. They might see a behaviour that [local] users are exhibiting. They think, let’s lean into this market. What’s really really important is to think through the end-to-end customer experience. I’ve seen teams invest more resources because they see [positive local] top-of-funnel metrics."

"But then they realize you can’t just add Brazilian Portuguese into the UI. They aren’t thinking things through. Can we accept payments? Do we owe local taxes? Does this change our company tax structure?” You need answers for such questions, argued Nataly.

James Atkin described one way to shake out interesting pull signals. “Cross-comparative testing is a data-led approach to understanding your local performance, into which you can test both a great and poorly performing market across all your core flows from functional testing through to UX review.” 

Ask us about cross-comparative testing

Adapt, intensify, and be inclusive

• Insights from Alessandra Binazzi | Principal Consultant | Global Sights Consulting | Nataly Kelly | Independent

This brief is designed to be a summary – so we’ll stop short of giving a full-blown theory of market entry. But our webinar did give us some starting points.  When evaluating a product for an international market, you should think about design inclusivity, intensification, and adaptation.

Alessandra Binazzi mentioned: “the first principle is simply: be inclusive. Make sure that your product and services are easy to access.” Thinking forward through an access case is a good way to identify some of the lowest hanging fruit in product globalization and to ensure your product is being built with global users in mind. Similarly, in our webinar about design inclusivity, panelists discussed that exclusivity in product design is a kind of technical debt. It’s worthwhile to invest in up-front inclusivity to make less adaptation necessary to begin with.

Intensification refers to an idea Nataly Kelly explores in her blog and recent book. The big idea is that you’re probably already live around the world if you have a website. So you can get out of a launch mindset, and get into a mindset which is about looking, listening, and growing your business in terms of what’s already working for a given group of users. 

Adapting your product or marketing for users is one of the main levers a product team has for local growth. The challenge, which we will discuss in most sections, is how to identify what kinds of product adaptations will drive profit and to build a viable function. Some product theorists are skeptical of product adaptation (“localization”) feeling that it introduces complexity; others prefer a distributed design process to build a product which truly works for everyone. 

The reality is likely to be that, as the prize of adapting your product comes down, your competitor environment will be filled with adaptive products offering users bespoke adaptive experiences. Simone Bohnenberger-Rich, the Chief Product Officer at Phrase, spelled out some of the possibilities of this beyond localization: the sports store which only loads multimedia from your favorite sport.  

Graft onto local network effects

• Insight from Diego Felix Dos Santos | Director of Product Management | Mastercard

Diego Santos, Product Lead at Mastercard, pointed out that product teams can often forget about a very different local set of competitors and that thinking about markets is a good route to go down. 

He was skeptical of marketing initiatives to enter a new market:

“You need deep pockets to fund [commercial offers] and new users are not likely to stick around when you stop funding them” he argued.

Instead, Diego recommended local network effects. Mastercard regularly relies on network effect for its product advantage; a two-sided marketplace of merchants and users. Famously the reason that a network effect is such a formidable way to build competitive advantage is that it’s so difficult to put together. 

Diego gave his advice: 

“If you’re starting from zero, meaning you have no user base at all… we partnered with a local card network called Mada in Saudi Arabia. The outcome was twenty five million new users for mastercard. Every time they go abroad, it goes through the Mastercard network.” 

Diego tells the story of both Disney+ and Uber Eats in episode 5 of the alignment which have similar stories about grafting onto existing network effects.

With a product like a card network, marginal growth is significantly easier than zero to one. Partnerships are a smart way of getting there.

Chapter 3

Building a team for local growth

Whether you’re building a localization team, an internationalization team, a globalization team, a global growth taskforce, or something else, thinking about what your team will look like and what it's function is vital planning to undertake before you identify personnel and skills you'll need to execute on the vision.

Here’s some evergreen insights our speakers made about building a global product team.

Key takeaways from chapter 3

1. Build a team with a point and an outcome
2. Any "global" product function should be about growth
3. Build the team your business needs and wants
4. "Global" happens at both the start and end of the product process
5. Technical teams are more powerful
6. Think carefully about using the word "localization" which has baggage

Build a team with a point and an outcome 

• Insight from Katell Jentreau, former Globalization Manager | Netflix | Jessica Grimm, Head of Localization | LOVOO | Brian McConnell,  Head of Localization | Notion

One of the biggest risks of your team is that they will become a cost center with no outcome.

Katell Jentreau, former Globalization Manager at Netflix argued: 

“Remember that you are not just a team – you are a function, and it’s really important that you think that way. This is a point I credit to the great Teresa Marshall from Salesforce. We should think of localization, globalization, as a function: it’s not just about building a team which delivers things… it’s about a function which is driving a business to achieve its goals” 

“Focus on impact… how is the business going to achieve its goals? If your goal is to increase revenue in Japan by 10% at the end of the year; how are you going to help achieve that?”

• (Global App Testing would like to wish Teresa luck in her ocean globe race on the Translated 9!) 

The Head of Localization at Stripe, Zach Duncan, went a little further, expressing skepticism about the idea that a “team” was the best lens to look at global product through.

“[Although] I really like the idea of building a team within this premise… I think that looking through the lens of more of a program and how to maximize overall effectiveness with all resources available is going to yield a better result”, Zach argued.

Finally, Yngvild Trøan, Localization Manager at Deliveroo, described how she has worked to get out of the translation fulfillment role which many localization managers don’t like.

"If you're working in a business that's relatively new to localization, chances are that the localization team was recruited to fill a specific business need overlooking translation during an expansion period… I think a majority of localization professionals know that we can contribute so much more beyond just project management. If this sounds like you, you're probably gonna want to redefine the localization team purpose, align it with the business needs, and start building and developing a team to deliver on that purpose.”

This function should be about growth

• Insight from Brian McConnell, Head of Localization | Notion | Katell Jentreau, Independent and former Globalization Manager | Netflix | Alexandru Dochian,  Senior Project Manager | Global App Testing 

If you have a global team which is cross functional, you should put it in part of the organization targeted on growth. Brian McConnell, Head of Localization at Notion, pointed out (of localization teams):

“It's a bit of an oddball function… it could end up in product, it could end up in engineering, it could end up in marketing, and my experience has been that it's really important to be in a part of the company that's focused on growth. Where you don't want to be is in an organization that's going to view localization as a cost center, because then you're just going to constantly struggle to get resources.”

When asked directly, webinar participants in our third webinar: driving localization speed and scale agreed that teams referred to as “localization” teams are better to sit in commercial parts of the business than operational parts.

Katell Jentreau, former Globalization Manager at Netflix, agreed: “If international growth is not a priority for the business. It's going to be a lot more difficult … one of the main reasons why I joined Netflix was that I knew that the company was almost hundred percent focused on international expansion.”

Alexandru Dochian, Project Manager at Global App Testing, described how teams which are more outcome-focused use testing and interact with his work at Global App Testing, differently: “Because that team is setting their own agenda, they’re more likely to be hung up on the question of what’s the smallest amount of work we can do for the biggest impact to that metric? Their relationship with testing is not adversarial… we’re partners in attempting to identify areas for growth.” 

Enjoying our briefing? You'll enjoy localizing your product with our crowd by your side even more

Here's a free local assessment to get you started

Build the team your business wants and needs

• Insight from Oleksandyr Pysaryuk, Senior Manager, Globalization Technology | GitLab | (when interviewed: Localization Technology, Shopify ) | Katell Jentreau, Independent and former Globalization Manager | Netflix 

In an early interview with Global App Testing, Oleksandr Pysaryuk – then Senior Lead, Localization Technology & Operations at Shopify, now at GitLab – was asked directly the biggest mistake he saw people make when they get into the industry. He identified that often, when you’re forming a function:

“It’s easy to want to do things the right way. The localization way. But you’re employed by a business.” You need to bend your process to what suits the business goal, argued Oleksandr.

Oleksandr described that at a previous employer (HR & Payroll Software, Ceridian) he had shifted into a technical internationalization role and built an enabler department. He had done this because Ceridian boasted a large number of local product managers and was essentially a decentralized product. 

Katell Jentreau, former Globalization Manager at Netflix, giave the bigger picture:

“Businesses will change. They will tell you suddenly that they’re going to launch games, or a new feature, and whereas nobody was thinking about that before, all of a sudden you need to drop everything. I would go as high as the mission of the business. I spent a long time at Netflix. Everybody at Netflix knows that the mission is to entertain the world. And that tells you a lot in terms of what your job should be.”  

Invest in globalization at both ends of your product process

• Insight from Daphne Chou, Localization Operations Manager | Riot Games | Natalia Martinez, Localization Operations Program Manager | Google | Francesca DiMarco, Head of I18n and Design Program Management | Pinterest | Carrie Fisher, Manager of Globalization Services | Subway 

There are two ways to think about ensuring a product is working for a particular group of users. The first is “localization”, the process of adapting a product built for domestic users to local users. The second is what we would call “globally inclusive design”, product design which de-centres domestic users in your product design and development process at the start. Lots of localization practitioners described that there was not globally inclusive enough. 

Carrie Fischer, Director of Localization Services at Subway, told a story about how she had localized the Subway rewards program. The marketing team had named it "the MVP" after "Most Valuable Player" – a term used in the US associated with baseball and American football. In order to generate something more appropriate for local 

Natalia Martinez, a Localization Operations Manager at Google, pointed out during our 2023 interview (when she was working as a Terminology Manager) that “It’s difficult to persuade people to think of global terminology first. People write in their domestic language first.”

When talking to other localization managers focused on tail-end adaptation, Daphne Chou described the role of advocacy and analysis in solving this: 

“At Riot Games, we have a dedicated team like localization and production that work very closely with our game team to make sure that the internal collaboration, and that the early conversation is happening upstream.” 

Francesca DiMarco, the well-known Head of Internationalization at Pinterest, found in our 2023 interview that focusing central business intelligence analysts on international users was a fruitful place to start.

 “We’d work with the analysts… so I’d work with our team of [business] analysts and ensure they had analysts dedicated to international.” Then, based on international sentiment analysis, “we’d have to persuade our PMs [Product Managers] to develop one feature rather than another.”

Our second episode of the alignment was all about team-building; you can watch it below.

Watch the episode

If you want the team to have teeth, they need access to developers and technology skills

• On background | Multiple interviewees and speakers

This guide is primarily intended for localization as a function of product, not of marketing. One theme which frequently came up in supporting conversations was access to developers. This creates complexity as the developer has to manage their relationship with the core engineering team; but also gives the team which commands the power to amend things.

Within a product department, teams which do not have any access to developers are sometimes unable to drive the changes they want to see for a local group of users. (Multiple stakeholders said on background that having direct control over engineers really enabled them to work and drive impact in a way they hadn’t before.) 

Think about how to address that the word "localization" may turn people off 

• Insight from Nataly Kelly | Independent 

The final thing to think about when building a globalization taskforce is your relationship with the word “localization.” To explain what we mean by this, author and influencer Nataly Kelly said:

“I think a lot of times if you have a localization role, you spend so much time trying to explain what you do and trying to get people to understand what it is that you do that sometimes we're bad about not listening enough. I am constantly saying, try not to use the L word when you’re talking to someone in sales or marketing. They’re going to instantly put up barriers.” 

Throughout our webinars and events, which have been attended by lots of localization heads of and managers, people complained about the difficulty of engaging different departments; a lack of interest in the program; difficulty borrowing resource across needed; and an attitude that a localized product is a “necessary evil”, building complexity into a product where it should not be.

Ensure your teams are cooperating

• Insight from Robert Bauch, Manager, Product Program Management | HubSpot 

Robert Bauch was part of the team which internationalized HubSpot in 2013. He said that his biggest tip for the launch was to cooperate.

“One of the big mistakes we ran into initially was that we defaulted to the idea that we needed a monolithic solution… to solve for speed and scale across all our organizations. As we rolled it out initially, we started to realize that we were meeting some needs in the organization, but not all needs. We had to take a step back from that mistake, focus on alignment across the company.”

For Robert, it was alignment itself which delivered growth.

Nataly Kelly said the same thing: "“I think it’s super important to align the product strategy with the geo strategy with the corporate strategy [...] In my time working at a large public company, sometimes I found that an element of our corporate strategy would be something I could hitch my international wagon to – as a topic du jour. Say we were trying to grow a certain area of the business… I’d say “oh, well in this market we have fewer local competitors for that. It’s a ripe opportunity to focus effort there. That made it much easier to do more of an intensification across the market while fuelling the company goal.”

Talia Zur Baruch, Founder of GlobalSaké and The LocLearn School offered a practical way to create alignment.

“I found that internal evangelism is the hardest part of our job. One thing we did [at Surveymonkey] was to create a Tiger Taskforce with representatives of the stakeholder leads from each function across the company come together weekly to discuss and align on the horizontal cross-functional international efforts."

“Our goal is to deliver products that are discoverable, usable and valuable for the diverse populations of the world. That means redefining, in some priority target markets, What problem we solve for (value proposition repositioning), Who we optimize the solution for (addressable segment), and How we define and measure success (KPIs).”

Need help in local markets?

Speak to us today

Chapter 5

Measuring your success and making the argument

Finally, making a strong internal argument for your function and measuring your success against clearly-defined goals is important to rinse and repeat the process. But how do you do it? 

Key takeaways from chapter 5

1. Most businesses can't actually isolate the impact of a particular action
2. A blend of commercial and operational metrics is best
3. Analysts will do a better job of calculating ROI
4. Our most frequent insight: talk like the people grading you 
5. Data needs a job: a job needs data
6. How to assess your local product value and quality

Most global teams can’t actually measure the value of specific activities

• Insight from Tucker Johnson, Cofounder | Nimdzi Insights (credit to Jeff Beatty,  Executive Director, Product Management - Globalization | The Walt Disney Company | and Global App Testing analysis

We’ve argued that localization teams should be commercially-oriented teams with a point, an outcome, and a plan to get there. This was the consensus from most of the leaders we spoke to… but there was also some ambivalence around measurement and goal setting. 

Partly this is to do with the difficulty of understanding local markets. Remember, the largest cohort of teams say they don’t know what impacts local revenue including when they are targeted on local revenue increases according to our 2023 state of localization quality report. But it also comes down to the unsuitability of ideas like “ROI” to capture actions which only work as part of a joined-up approach between departments. 

In his talk during our alignment episode on high-ROI localization, the founder of Nimdzi Insights Tucker Johnson quoted two of the most well-known figures in product globalization on the topic for his speech. The first was Nataly Kelly, who had appeared in other webinars.

We can help you get the data you need to measure local market performance

Speak to us today

A blend of commercial and operational metrics is best 

• Insight from Miguel Sepulveda, Globalization Director | King | Julio Leal, Head of Localization | Spendesk | Brian McConnell, Head of Localization | Notion | Tucker Johnson,  Cofounder | Nimdzi Insights

Lots of our speakers cautioned what they saw as excessively operations-focused departments failing to look out for the value of their work. It was the advice of several professionals to ensure you measure and communicate commercial goals.

Below is an excerpt from Miguel Sepulveda, the Globalization Director at King Games and owner of the yolocalizo blog:

“There are metrics where we track and report to leadership… metrics where localization is contributing to growth; which can help explain the added value of localization. So for example, the average revenue per user locally; customer retention rates per market; monthly and daily active users by country. Once we have identified the right metrics, the other two that we need to consider are the tools, how we will communicate them. There’s a long list. You should use the same tools as your company data team and pass it to the data center.”

“If you think about when we report the number of linguistic bugs, it doesn't provide insights into our contribution to global growth."

Julio Leal and Tucker Johnson both spent time on this point as well. The only person who made the opposite case was Brian McConnell, Head of Localization at Notion, who said:

“It's unfair to be graded on economic metrics because localization is just one factor in your success in a market. I would highlight Japan as an example… I generally prefer to be graded on operational metrics. And then, you know, the marketing team, that's the team that gets graded on revenue metrics.”

Analysts will do a better job of calculating cost and value than localization professionals 

• Insight from Miguel Sepulveda,  Globalization Director | King | Julio Leal, Head of Localization | Spendesk | Brian McConnell, Head of Localization | Notion | Tucker Johnson, Cofounder | Nimdzi Insights

At HR software Ceridian, Oleksandyr Pysaryuk used an ROI professional in another department to calculate the ROI of his actions. He argued that it was a waste of his time to calculate something so abstract, and that their ROI expert would do it better. Pinterest and HubSpot both described using analysts to calculate not only the opportunity but the effectiveness of different actions in global product localization, an arrangement which works for them.

One of the standout answers to any question was Tucker Johnson, the CEO of Nimdzi Insights’, answer to the question “I am concerned that my efforts in product localization is having a low return on investment. What should I do?” 

Tucker Johnson answered: “Build relationships with someone in finance or analytics. Seriously – you’re going to need that data. You have to have the cost information… make friends with someone in the analytics and data team. When you have the data, you can begin making assumptions around cost and begin to plan to improve.” 

Besides the difficulty associated with ROI, there is also the question of interest. As one localization professional said:

“Sometimes I'm joking that we need to do localization impact propaganda.”

In some cases, questions asked about what works to drive revenue sometimes got mistaken for a question about how to take an argument to a business. Both are obviously important, but the challenge of separating out the impact of localization alone can make it easier to think in terms of advocacy.

Our most frequent insight was that you should talk like the people grading you

• Insight from Ronald Cummings-John, Cofounder | Global App Testing | Oleksandyr Pysaryukm Current: Senior Manager, Globalization Technology | GitLab | | Katell Jentreau, Independent - former Globalization Manager | Netflix |  Julio Leal, Head of Localization | Spendesk | Giulia Tarditi, Head of Global Experience | Qualtrics | Adam Zabel, Senior Account Executive | Global App Testing

Lots of speakers gave the insight that you should talk in terms of what your managers, your stakeholders, and your local teams value. We’ve put down some of it here:

You should talk like your managers 

Ronald Cummings-John, CEO of Global App Testing, opened with it on the very first episode of the alignment. “People get relegated to the person they sound like,” he pointed out. “People who end up in senior positions talk like that… so you need to think through what you’re doing from the perspective of senior management and see it in those terms.”

You should talk like your business

Oleksandyr Pysaryuk, Head of Globalization Technology at GitLab, was the first to make this point in his interview in early 2023.

“Talk like your organizational language. If it’s product and technology obsessed, you should create a roadmap. You should never shut up about the roadmap.” 

“If the product priorities are around launching new features, make sure your conversations with them describe how you’ll help. If marketing is working hard to increase organic traffic on their websites, show them the value that your team can bring with a proper SEO localization strategy. Ultimately, all you wanna prove is full alignment with the metrics under KPIs.”

The reverse approach would be to make sure you join a business which thinks like you. This was the argument of Katell Jentreau, former Globalization Manager at Netflix.

Katell Jentreau said: “one of the main reasons why I joined Netflix, at the time, was that I knew that the company was almost hundred percent focused on international expansion… this is where the growth would have to come from because internally, it was not at saturation but it was close to it.If international expansion, international growth is not a priority for the business. It's going to be a lot more difficult to have this conversation with leadership.”

Julio Leal, Head of Localization at Spendesk, agreed: “If the product priorities are around launching new features, make sure your conversations with them describe how you’ll help. If marketing is working hard to increase organic traffic on their websites, show them the value that your team can bring with a proper SEO localization strategy. Ultimately, all you wanna prove is full alignment with the metrics under KPIs.”

You should talk like the teams you're trying to sell to

Giulia Tarditi, Head of Global Experience at Qualtrics, talked about “playing the why game” in our in-person  alignment even tin London 2023. The idea is that toddlers like to play the why game, where they continue to ask why – but that adults are more likely to come and lecture incumbent teams on what they should be doing. 

Sign up to our global growth email series

Think "value" over "quality"

• Insight from Miguel Sepulveda | Globalization Director | King | Tucker Johnson | Cofounder | Nimdzi Insights 

Two speakers made near-identical points about value vs quality. Miguel Sepulveda, the Globalization Director of King Games, said: “Localization teams tend to focus on quality while senior management prioritize value. So we need to move forward and move towards demonstrating growth, which is the key to effectively communicating our team value to senior management."

Tucker Johnson, Founder of Nimdzi Insights, said: “Not to say that those aren't related concepts. But they are different. So rather than focusing on quality, we're focusing on what is the value that our localized products are bringing to our end customer.”

Adam Stead, the host of all episodes, pointed out that this had changed the way businesses think about their QA, too:

“I particularly love the point about moving from quality to value. I think that as a QA organization… we think a lot about quality, but that mirrors the journey of lots of teh kinds of test our clients do with us. Many of them operate on a quality-first paradigm, but a value-first paradigm is equally valid as a way of identifying product areas to troubleshoot and improve.” 

Slice and dice to find the right story to enable you to work

• Insight from Horatiu Marc, Senior Project Manager | Global App Testing | Nataly Kelly, Chief Growth Officer | Rebrandly | Talia Baruch, Founder | GlobalSaké 

Earlier we heard from Nataly Kelly, who argued that “sometimes I found that an element of our corporate strategy would be something I could hitch my international wagon to – as a topic du jour. Say we were trying to grow a certain area of the business… I’d say “oh, well in this market we have fewer local competitors for that.”

Lots of the most impressive individuals we spoke to were highly data-oriented. Talia Baruch “spent a lot of time with Metabase” ; Francesca Di Marco “ensured an analyst was always focused on international”.

Understanding your performance everywhere unlocks real and measurable effectiveness. 

Talia Baruch explained how she took a company from a place of skepticism around international using data.

“In all international markets because they saw that more than seventy percent of their revenue was in the US/Canada and only thirty in international. But looking at that data and slicing it by country, I actually saw that the percentage of their paid pro paid professionals out of the total market is very different by countries. In Japan, Germany, and Spain, I think it was double the percentage of the US and Canada. It told a different story. It gives you a different metric, a different understanding of our gaps.” 

Data needs a job; a job needs data

• Insight from Horatiu Marc | Senior Project Manager | Global App Testing 

Horatiu Marc works on some of the world’s biggest product localization teams via Global App Testing. He described his past experiences gathering data for multiple teams to use and how he had improved effectiveness.

“One of the biggest challenges I’ve heard from clients is that they collect data but it doesn’t find a job. That means that nothing happens after collecting it – nobody cares about it. One of the things I’ve learned here at GAT that sometimes everything starts from the wrong place… instead of starting with that information, you should probably start with what can actually help internal teams.” 

“We’ve solved the issue at GAT with better and deeper listening. We target our UX researchers and testers based on the priority of issues for specific stakeholders amongst our clients, and deliver suggestions based on an impact framework informed by our client.” 

“If you involved in data collection never forget that client mindset – think about thee decision points your stakeholders will need the information at.” 

How to assess your local product value and quality

• Analysis from Global App Testing

Across every effort to drive local effectiveness and grow globally is data. And one thing which has become clear over as we ran more alignment episodes and several interviews that we ran is the centrality of data to any global product strategy. 

We’ve heard that businesses do all kinds of testing to enable global growth:

• You’re forming a market theory and it would help to review your existing experience for local users. 
• You want to compare your experiences in a market you’re winning vs one which you’re finding harder. 
• You’re running A/B testing approaches but you want faster data and a thorough explanation of the result. 
• You need to quality check a new feature like a local checkout or payment gateway or low data version of your app.
• You’re experimenting with mass AI-translation rollout and you’re not sure what an appropriate quality strategy looks like. 
• You’re trying to measure the effectiveness of your actions in a global product team.
  
  

All of these require a robust, scalable, practical approach to testing which is cost effective and can get your product to the correct users, in the correct places, using the correct devices, environments and hardware.