Localization reimagined as a strategic function

Igor Afanasayev 00:06
Today with us next will be a TISA Hi. So it he leads localization at Procore, which is an enterprise solution for, for construction businesses. And she has over 15 years of combined experience in global businesses and in localization and her forte is weaving localization into the fabric of the overall organization and making sure that that the organization as a whole fosters that global mindset. So today, he will be talking exactly about that how to make localization a global like strategic function of the company. I believe it he is already with us today. At do you see us do you hear us? We do we hear you say something?

Iti Sahai 00:59
Hi. Oh, I can hear you. Hi, your I can hear you. I can see you. How about you can use see and hear me Awesome.

Igor Afanasayev 01:07
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Thank you so much for joining us today. And yeah, we do see your presentation. So please, please go ahead. And

Iti Sahai 01:19
well, first of all, hi, everyone. And thank you for taking the time to attend this conversation today. My name is Isa Hi, I lead localization and enable growth for an enterprise SaaS solution. As Igor already pointed it at Procore. I'm on the buyer side. And mostly in my career, I've been on the buyer side of things. But I've also had the wonderful opportunity to work on the vendor side to understand the business more holistically. And the topic that I'm presenting today is essentially to encourage the localization buyers to think more strategically and give them some key implementable takeaways, while reimagining localization as a strategic function. But before we dive into finding the answers and exploring this huge industry challenge, I'd encourage all of us to look at the photo on the screen. And perhaps some of you art and culture enthusiasts recognize it and have seen it in person. It is the statue of David created by Michelangelo. And the uniqueness of the sculpture lies in the fact that it is carved from a single block of marble and stands tall at 17 feet. This masterpiece is larger than life accompanied by the attention to detail and the finesse with which it is crafted. And when Michelangelo was asked what his vision was, you know, for David, he simply shared to all the chips have more than not belong to David in his vision. And that's how David came to being. Now you notice how Michelangelo didn't choose to say that his vision for David, he chose to sculpt 10 hours a day, and each hour, he was going to come in with 157 strokes on the chisel to get the most efficient output for his birthday. Instead, he chose to focus on the image of David and his vision for that giant block of marble. I encourage you to remember this giant block of marble that turned into this artful masterpiece because it'll come in handy later on in this conversation all of us are having. Now, why is there a need for us to reimagine ozone with the realization exists today in most companies, the need arises essentially, from this anecdotal conversation we usually you know, have in our industry and I often hear industry leaders, stating that localization comes in too late in the process and usually is an afterthought. It's I often hear colleagues complain and you know, I hear they're frustrated. And don't think about localization soon enough. And typically, we have to really turn around into you know, delivering these translations and the translation requirements to be fulfilled, not enough time really to afford to focus on the effort and the end user experience, as many of us here would agree with that sentiment. Now, when you think of long term plan, what word comes to mind, the first word that pops up in my head is strategy. And in my opinion strategy is beyond just to look ahead, you know, into the future focused approach. It is also focused on addressing the challenges at hand. To me strategy is about keeping your head in the sky, but your ear to the ground, assessing and evaluating the scale of growth that the organization is heading towards while being proficient at managing the challenges standing in the way to achieve that. So now that we have that shared understanding of what strategy should mean, let's get a little creative. Let us address the role of traditional localization team embedded either on the marketing side or even product. The traditional localization team typically focuses on the output. But when we think of strategy aligning our efforts to the, you know, that caters to the goals of the business as a localization team, our focus should instead be on outcomes. So in essence, from the project management perspective, taking the day to day and the output of words cost turnaround time, essentially the throughput, it needs to be redefined into a more out of the most challenging thing to learn in this is that globalization teams are not our at all solve the problems, that in ways we bring value to the customer and yet work for the business. And as such, these teams can't be held accountable for the results. The localization manager is essentially a project manager who is funneling and clearing through the backlog items, and mostly playing catch up to the assets of the business, the motivation can be low, and the sense of ownership is definitely quite minimal. And there is little to no innovation, it is easy to see why so many of the organizations are creating amazing products and services in their domestic market. However, they are not able to have the same amount of impact with their localized product and the international space. And in my experience and observation. It is not the most companies don't want to transform it is understanding that having the transformational shift is not easy. And most localization teams just don't even know how to make that change, or what does that even really mean to transform. What is most needed for LCK teams is to be more strategically aligned and powered localization team instead. differentiator is between you know, a traditional team versus being a strategically aligned empowered look to you is the critical difference in mindset. And that's the track I'm speaking on today. The key differentiator lies in how the organization views localization internally, the traditional look team is that as you know, focus on the output is is challenged by the organization's view as an expense on a cost center. However, once we make this paradigm shift, and this transit transition, this transformation towards being an outcome focused, strategically aligned lobe team, our success is measured with the outcome because we enable growth. Now since the theme of this conference today is stronger by sharing, I'd like to share some of the initiatives that have allowed me to make that shift in my career so far, while building localization teams that have a more strategic approach. These are few of the key pillars that allowed me to be successful, it may be different for your individual circumstance. However, my main goal here today is to get you all fired up and to inspire you. So let's begin, shall we, the first step to reimagine a local brand, your team. Now, what is a brand mean to you, when you think of a brand, you know, it usually is a product or a service that evokes a certain intangible feeling within us, right? It's certain iconic brands could evoke the sentiment of luxury, comfort or even reliability, they're able to do so because from their mere inception of these brands, there was an intentional effort towards the purpose and the market solution or customer value these brands were looking to provide. This intentionally crafted brand leads to certain levels of quality expectations that have almost an immediate association with the brand name, the logo and their market image. So while embedded within the organization, I highly encourage you as localization leaders, to think of your own team brand within the company. If you start start out as a look, you know, alone as a one person team or with a team of dedicated resources, sit down and brainstorm the value proposition of your team ideate within the group and solidify your mission and vision. The mission is essentially what you set out to do. And the vision is how you plan to achieve it. But why do we need to have a sense of branding for a localization team you might ask very question, to have clarity around the purpose of your teams. With this set mission and vision, you can then reach out to collaborators and stakeholders and initiate conversations. The more you make yourself visible, the better it is because you should be the face of everything localization within your company. So anytime anyone has a question or a query or they had a discovery, they found something that they were excited to share that was tied into localization. They know where to find you. Ideally, you may consider going on a road show, knocking on as many doors setting up as when you get to know your conversations as you can. I have noticed, you know in hypergrowth organizations specifically where ownership and autonomy is considered. Business Units can tend to start operating in silos and there's a lack of established localization Center of Excellence. Right? So you can try to get some screen time on the r&d or marketing all hands townhall meetings, where you might not need more than five minutes on air to introduce yourself and have a specific call to action. Alternatively, you can consider hosting a lunch and learn or post open office hours where people can reach you. If they don't feel comfortable asking questions on a public platform. You can even try sending a note on the department newsletter regarding the localization team that has been spun up. This effort can be supplemented with some very lightweight reading material on our internal wiki page, including fundamental definitions and visual examples. Because most of the people outside of our little silo and bubble of localization don't understand it quite well, I think that's a great learning opportunity for everyone. I would encourage you, even if you're a mighty team, one one to sit and deliberate your mission and vision followed by creating champions across the org, in people who who love to travel, or they have a soft spot for languages. This is very important, because the following steps that I'm about to share are built on this baseline planning exercise. But I also believe it is important to get everyone on your own team excited, you know, excited about the role within the organization. Every movement or revolution that has been started till date has been fueled by passion. It's always for something because positive thoughts fuel our purpose. And as localizers, it's quite evident that we are extremely passionate about the work we do. In my experience of coming up with the mission and vision for my teens. I've had to go through some difficult conversations with leadership, I'm not gonna lie, because of the initial misaligned expectations. However, after doing the exercise, that difference of opinion was resolved. And clarity between leadership vision for the team versus the team's members vision for themselves was achieved. And that's what we want, right? We want an aligned outcome. But without this exercise, even creating a space to have that difficult, yet important conversation, moving us in the direction towards the success of the business is not even going to be possible. Which leads me to pillar, which is lead with a service mindset. So when you're planning of the law program, first one overall evaluation, right where things sit now, but reach out to different business units just about everyone and anyone you can imagine who might have a touch point with international or growth within the company. And you can think of a potential possibility of a future collaboration with them. Reach out to them with a mindset to solve a challenge might be facing in terms of international launch. You may ask, why is there a need to reach out when at mindset, right? Why can't I just be direct? And in this beautiful, thorough localization process that I created? Well, what liver Are you looking for? When process right? You got to make friends first, I would recommend that it might be better in cash the teams instead and have a better adoption and experience in the collaboration, instead of them be grudgingly doing something just going through the motions, right? There's a lot of power in reaching out to someone without asking anything in return. Because they would see localization as a true operation, then it could be a Slack message or note, create champions for yourself something small, could also have a big impact on someone's day. And you don't know what impact you're making. Oftentimes in business, we have that transactional outlook, right? We absolutely need to know before making a deal or negotiating that what isn't it for me. But when you have someone reach out to you without wanting something in return, right off the bat, you can you tend to like that person, you know, it creates that likeness that bond over time and creates trust. And it forms the foundation for a lasting partnership. With that service mindset and understanding the challenges and problems of your colleagues that they're facing. In their specific beings, you now have insight into challenges right front row seat to all their problems that could lead to potential solutions. So in one of my previous roles, I spent a lot of time getting to know my stakeholders that were embedded within the different regions. And of course, with distributed teams, it was challenging to build trust immediately. So I set time aside every week to gradually get to know the regional process. So I could align it over time with the corporate vision. So in the due course of the conversations after our build some trust and you know, taking a few ships to, to the regional offices, the team shared with me how they were frustrated with the platform that was being used, because each time a new piece of content, or a new campaign was being localized, their review feedback will not be captured in the TMS and invariably that report again in the future content, and they had to go in and make the changes manually. As a result of that it was causing a lot of frustration on their end because they seem to be repeating a task over and over again. And that right there was a potential opportunity to make their regional localization experience seamless by creating capabilities within their process to capture the changes once and for all in the TMS. So by solving this one problem for them, I was able to build that trust and over time, utilize that collaboration to have them integrate localization enablement, in their internal process right over time, they helped me now this example may not exactly fit in the current scenario Hear that you are facing at your company. However, I encouraged you to think along the lines of the service mindset. Approach conversations with your stakeholders with your expertise to gain knowledge and build trust over time. Everyone should know you as the face of look, even though you are a team of one, especially if you're a team of Mighty One, someone very wise once told me that localization should never come across as a blocker, which is the key to success of localization over time, understand the challenges of your stakeholders and to actually find a solution come in as an informed ally. But that's not enough. You need to really plant the seeds for global mindset. Localization is more than just creating translation related efficiencies across different teams. It's more about the continuous socialization and evangelization of work that we do, which is more importantly, tied to the global mindset. It's about imagining, remember that David, that statue of David that we saw, it's about imagining that David in that giant blob of oil, a great place to start is looking for and creating opportunities for yourself and the existing workflows have different views. For instance, the documentation team and customer success might have a process workflow, on how they write technical documentation and the source language. After you've had some traction and potentially build some trust the stakeholders try to get your hands on the internal workflow doc, and identify its owners. While you study the workflow and learn from the teams. As to how they are able to efficiently make decisions and manage documents through its lifecycle. You have the opportunity to learn other challenges from the group and think of implementing a multilingual user enabling efficiency and the definition of grassroot champions to build through the branding exercise and that service mindset across teams will help you advocate your vision to their leadership, and share your perspective on what potential efficacy can be implemented in the workflows to achieve that global outlook that enabled scale. Remember, this operative word scale? Workflow docs definition of done are a great place to start. However, you could even look at the complex go to market documentation, it might come come across as a you know hefty task considering the complexity of this document, usually, but it's the goldmine of opportunity. Usually at some place in this go to market doc, there will be a little option after the source content, most likely in English is typically finalized that needs to be localized or translated within a two week window before launch stream, the launch timeframe, and the value your work. Recognize the champions you have created over time and having the executive buy in, you'd be in a position to then go and negotiate the possibility of localization included a little sooner in that window. Another example regarding the engineering teams when you reach out to engineering lead with it and internationalization related issues that downstream impact localization, you have a business case ready with data and former tickets, bugs and potentially the time to ITM gaps. Dead debt is a great currency to bring to the table when negotiating the definition of Done and implementing localization within the development process. The capabilities of it, you can capture the current metric, showcasing the efficiency and killer process and time savings by implementing it and best practices. Another great opportunity for teams is to learn from the product roadmap, and it's, you know, there are features that are going to be launched in multiple languages across different regions and at what phase can they potentially be localized, not just from the language perspective, but also this is all a great opportunity for you to lean in and provide your expertise regarding product product market fit if you're familiar with any of those regions. Recently, I one runner up at the process innovation challenge which is organized by lope world and the innovation that I presented, utilized community sourced meaning it was absolutely free and available to anyone who's interested, pseudo or quasi localization capabilities and translator plugins into the enterprise design solution figma. Now these plugins are powered by Mt engines through open API's providing translations, and 104 languages, almost with a click of a button. So very intuitive. But this process innovation had the potential to help with the elimination of downstream efforts by product designers, and it allowed them to build empathy for the multilingual end user, create a language agnostic design and more efficiently go to market. This is a perfect example of creating my brand and the company building those champions understanding their pain points and being creative to find a solution that allowed for those teams to have a global first outlook. Granted, global might not be the first thing everyone wakes up and thinks about right. That's my job. But if it's not the first that everyone considers pleases me to the top 10 considerations, which in itself is when the secret ingredient all This is no secret at all. It's like salt. It's collaboration. So, now you may ask that we cover the three pillars to reimagine localization. But where do I start? And my response to you is, start. Now, anywhere, you know, now that you have a giant block of marble, and granted, David in one day, but once you have found these beautiful, subtle ways to implement the global organization, and there is a lot of buzz around localization and international growth, people know you people like you, invariably, you're setting yourself up for success and skill that comes with international expansion. Once again, remember, remember that statue of David, and recall the giant block of marble it was collected from designing and building a strategic lock team can feel like that the task at hand for you in your journey and your jobs might be difficult. And at times, it's hard to see through that block of marble. But as long as you have your vision set on that, David, what your outcome needs to be, you can make it happen. If there is just one takeaway from my conversation with you today, I would encourage you to know that you are an expert in the room for everything localization, you think about it more than literally anyone else, and in the whole company, right? Or any other functions. So feel empowered to share your vision and encourage everyone in the room to listen, focus on the outcome, and not so much on the output. Thanks again for joining me in this conversation, everyone. If you are looking to expand your network and continue the conversation, please reach out to me and connect on LinkedIn. And now I'll hand it over to Igor, to open the floor to some questions.

Igor Afanasayev 21:56
Thank you so much it he it was a wonderful example of presentation being done. So well. Thank you. Thank you for joining us today. While we're waiting for questions from the audience. There's one question from me, actually. So you were mostly focused on the, you know, like, like personal aspects, like how can you brand localization within your team like people skills, soft skills, etc? What about automation? Do you believe that improving the the technical aspect of localization can bring that, you know, more powerful to you as a leader of localization or to your team?

Iti Sahai 22:35
I would say, you know, in, so this is the second layer to the localization onion, right, like the first layer is encouraging people to even buy intuition buy into the importance of it. Because a lot of the times, there is there's two mindsets, I believe, two leading either you can lead through fear, or you can lead through hope and excitement, I'll choose to lead through the ladder. Know something, at times, they're very reluctant, not just from their own sort of sense of inadequacy or inability to understand localization. But you need to first encourage them to lean into that conversation, right. And once that door is open, or that little windows of conversation can then lead technology as to this is what I can do for you, as opposed to leading with technology when they don't even know what the point of it all is. Right.

Igor Afanasayev 23:31
Okay, thank you so much. We have a question from Katherine Bozeman. What did or does your roadshow look like at Procore? Any specific advice on roadshow execution for different stakeholders?

Iti Sahai 23:46
Absolutely. So the roadshow was very, very light on slides and a light on text. As you might have noticed, from my presentation style, I'm a storyteller at heart. So I like to reveal a story that tugs at people's heartstrings. And of course, data is important, but essentially, anecdotally, it reminds me of the story that Jeff Bezos shared when in his early days at Amazon, that, you know, he would go to prospects and you would have a conversation and after the fact of him having presented, people would ask, so what is the internet? Right, so it sort of misses the point of the conversation, which in my case, similar to my experience to Catherine's question, I like to open the conversation with how familiar are we with localization? And if we aren't, let's start defining this for you. Right, let's start defining it in the context of the company, the organization, the growth we're looking to achieve. So it's very lightweight. It's essentially visually putting it in context for people as to what internationalization means what localization means what regionalization means just basics right? Going back to the what is it? What is the internet So essentially that and very lightweight slide deck, but at the same time, if it's a feature team, then I would do a first hand audit of their feature to understand if there are any gaps on the user facing side of the product. Or if it's a marketing team as to what is the perception of the plan look like in region, and lead, and then having that supplemental information available later on, I would never lead with that. Because I'm there to make allies and to encourage people to convert and your biggest advocates are going to be converts. So that's essentially the mindset. I have towards that. roadshow. And yeah.

Igor Afanasayev 25:38
Just a follow up, small follow up question from me. You mentioned the slide deck that you're using to go and talk with different stakeholders. Is it always the same slide deck? Or could it be different for different types of audience?

Iti Sahai 25:52
It is, it is different it is. So as I said, you know, the basics, sort of first four or five slides are quite similar with the basic definitions and visual elements to supplement those definitions, so people have a good understanding of you know, what it means, especially in the context of the tech stack, etc. So apart from that, the follow up for five slides would then be different depending on if its feature team I'm talking to or if it's, you know, some leadership, I'm essentially, being in the business of language, you need to understand who the audience is and what the language they speak, right? Every stakeholder every leader I speak to might have a different different outlook or some different challenge that they're looking to solve, right. So what it what is the most value to them, what will drive the point home for them is what I tend to find some examples for, and then roadshow slide deck.

Igor Afanasayev 26:49
Okay. All right. Thank you so much. And we have just one more minute for us to go over the poll. So I just want to thank you again, it for being with us today. It was a real pleasure. Thank you so much.

Iti Sahai 27:02
Thank you so much, everyone. And please reach out and connect on LinkedIn. I'm happy to continue the conversation. Thanks so much. Thank you