“Selling” localization within your own company "{Panel discussion}"

Bryan Montpetit 00:00
Perfect. And we're gonna run, let it run for about a minute or so. And the next session that we have coming up is selling localization within your own company, which is going to be a panel discussion actually run by Katherine bossman. So we'll see that in one brief moment. All right, and we have Catherine Joining us now. How are you doing?

Kathrin Bussmann 00:23
Oh, good. Thanks. I just realized I looked you up on LinkedIn. And it seems we're compatriots. So it's nice to have another Canadian on the on the lokfromhome today.

Bryan Montpetit 00:34
Absolutely. Well, we're, we're everywhere.

Kathrin Bussmann 00:36
We are.

Bryan Montpetit 00:39
Happy to have another Kinect on the on the screen with me. It's great.

Kathrin Bussmann 00:43
Very excited to be doing this today.

Bryan Montpetit 00:45
Thanks for having me. No, thank you. And I appreciate the fact that you're going to moderate this panel. We've obviously got wonderful guests here that are going to help the panelists are very knowledgeable. And I've looked at each and every one of them on LinkedIn as well. I've done my background checks on them, they look fantastic. So I'm really really, you know, interested in hearing all the perspectives. I think we've all been victim of, you know, our clients or clients, colleagues or even our colleagues, not necessarily, you know, understanding the need for localization. It always seems to be that necessary evil that comes after the fact. So, with that, I'll let you introduce your panelists. And I'll be back towards the end and we can probably go through some q&a.

Kathrin Bussmann 01:25
Fantastic. Sounds good. All right. Well, thanks for tuning in. I'm really honored to be moderating this panel discussion today. My name is Katherine Bussmann, I'm the head of Ferber Chino verbage. Chino is actually not a localization company at all. It's a strategic marketing consultancy that focuses on global content strategy. And so I like to help digital first companies build their global brands. But I'm also the creator and host of the worldly Marketer Podcast, and some of you might already be familiar with it. It's a weekly interview style show, where I cover all aspects of global marketing issues. And included in that, from my perspective is localization. My background is in linguistics originally and Communication Studies. I'm based in Toronto. And this topic today of selling localization within your own company is actually a really interesting one. To me, I like to always focus on the client side of local data localization, because I, that's who I work with. So today, you know, we hear this a lot. Localization teams do not often work in relative obscurity, unfortunately, within their company, especially larger companies. And so how can client side localization manager, you know, sell localization within their own company, and make sure that it's it becomes a fully integrated part of the work process there. So to discuss this, I've got three excellent and highly experienced in house localization managers. First, I'd like to introduce Christina rajiva. She is the head of localization at Skyscanner. Of course, most of you will be familiar with Skyscanner. It's a UK based travel tech company. It's been around since 2003. And Christina has actually been there since 2016. She is actually based in Barcelona. Next we have issued Yan Beto, who is localization manager at Roblox. ROBLOX is a tech company that's based in San Mateo, California. And it has been around since 2000 2006. It's actually an online platform that that empowers a global community of about 100 million monthly users to play, imagine and create together. So it's basically a gaming platform for kids, if I understand correctly, so your dad can correct me on that. She has been with Roblox since 2018. And he's in the San Francisco Bay Area. Last but not least, we have a severe match which localization Product Manager for continuous localization systems at InfoPath. And some of you might have just caught his presentation just a little while ago. I know I did. And it was super interesting. It's well, I am not sure I'm the best person to explain what info VIP does, but it's an IT company based in London. And it's a it focuses on communication platforms with a wide range of message messaging channels and tools. I believe the headquarters is in London, and the company has been around since 2006. Samir has been there since 2016. And he's actually joining us, I believe, from Sarajevo. So I'd like to start off by asking each of my panelists to kind of describe what their localization team at their company looks like, how big is it? How many languages do you support, you know, all of these companies? So I've mentioned are sort of on the maturity scale, they're kind of along the way to becoming very mature. So it'd be interesting to hear how many languages you support. And how does your team currently interact with other teams at the company, you know, for instance, the engineering team, product, team, marketing, sales, etc. So I'd like to start with Justine, that maybe you can start us off and just explain. Tell us about your team and what you do and how you do it at Skyscanner?

Hristina Racheva 05:32
Sure, thanks. Thanks, Catherine, for the introduction. So yeah, we are, we have 35 languages. And we, we do the usual content types, mainly products, our website and app, all the marketing communication with customer satisfaction, Help Center content. And as a team, it's I think, all of us in the localization teams is kind of a continuous journey. So for us as a team, that has definitely been one. And lucky me in the last year and a half, we've seen our team really grow in terms of numbers of people on the team. But also, of course, with the increase of the team size, we also have done amazing things in the last year and a half. So now we have an interesting thing. And I guess the lucky being looking at in that case is we have a localization side of the team accommodation managers and project managers. And we have equal almost size a team of internationalization engineers. So it's, it's really amazing to have that technical support. So we have seven engineers, and we are eight in total. On the localization side, we work very closely together, the engineers help us in terms of building tooling, Autumn automation, optimization of processes, they also help the internal stakeholders, developers, mainly enabling them and doing things better and faster. And on the localization side. So how do we work with with organization I guess, just like any other localization team, we, you know, we are this kind of horizontally almost access to the organization because we interact with pretty much all disciplines at different levels. One thing that we did recently, we have a dedicated, for example, almost a small part of the team on marketing, collaboration, so we'll arrange quite an evening to work closer with them. So we focused a bit of dedicated to people there on that side. And then the other kind of type of interaction is just the daily to enablement and support that the stakeholders that we work with. So that's briefly about as your new

Kathrin Bussmann 07:57
rookie mistake, sorry. No, I'm saying I know you're gonna have lots to say on this topic. fistina, because you actually gave a really excellent presentation, one of my favorites, actually at the recent, local worldwide 42, you know, local to the conference, which you know, with with a colleague of yours about how to how to get buy in from the C suite essentially at your company and raise the profile of the localization team so so I'm so glad you're on this panel today. I'm gonna move on to Julia and as you lead, perhaps you can tell us a bit about your team, how big it is, which you know, how many languages you're, you're kind of supporting and how you're working with, you know, the rest of the company right now. You know, for good, real, but, you know, I'm sure there's always room for improvement. But tell us a little bit about the situation that Roblox

Julien Bertaud 08:44
Sure. So again, thank you for the introduction. Geffen for putting all this together. But yeah, I mean, I think Roblox and to, to like, it's really similar to Sinha talked about other company. I mean, we have a localization site, which I would call like the core localization team, which is the physician management and our linguists, we actually have a full team of linguists in house to support validation effort. And then on the other end of the spectrum, we actually have some internationalization engineering. We have some business development as well for international. That's already part of Roblox and the way that the localization team works on this is again, just like Christina, I would say, like the horizontal that goes across all vertical is the localization team. So yeah, so we are very involved with all matters of content that gets published, whether it's on our product side, whether it's talking with engineering when we start drafting new features, whether it's talking with design, when we talk about revamping some UI or launching, again, the development of new features. So the localization team is really involved into this like I would say like Ahead of the development cycle so that we don't run into issues at a later point, which is nice when he works. It's not I will say, it doesn't always work that way. But that's the intention that we have. But yeah, so really, that's that's how we interact with all the teams. I probox. Again, is that way, the addition that we have, though, is for localization perspective, which is really interesting, from for our team at Roblox and localization Corp is that we also work with our business development team. What I mean by that is just that we leverage our resources in house, and then knowledge of the country that they grew up in, to understand the type of partnership we should do and how we should interact with a certain market, which I think brings a little new skill set to some of our localization people in our team. And yeah, in a nutshell, that's the way that we interact within a box. In terms of languages that we support. We're actually pretty new. In the localization world. At Roblox, like you mentioned, we've been around for a while. But we did our first language release about two years ago, two and a half years ago. And we not currently support eight languages now.

Kathrin Bussmann 11:18
Very cool. Well, Samir, what can you tell us about the team that you work with, that you lead? At InfoPath, I mean, you you are specifically focused on continuous localization. But perhaps there are other applications for localization. You know, there's, I'm sure the marketing department needs some localization done to and other other areas of the company. Tell me about your team and the languages you support and how you are integrated within the company currently.

Semir Mehadzic 11:53
Yeah, I actually nailed it in the introduction, I'm handling this localization, localization pipeline. And I've only recently taken over it this summer, actually, I was helping from the last year, people completely redesigned the process, as I explained in the previous presentation, but I actually will be running this part only from this summer officially. So since I've taken over, I cannot really tell about the localization strategy before me, but I knew that we did things internally. And we really want to remember the supported 20 languages. And we are now reconsidering whether they all need to be supported. But if they are supported, they should be properly support, you know, it's kind of weeding out whatever is a possible waste. We are taking over, we're analyzing this, and we're about to adjust to the what data tells us at this moment. From the previous setup, we kept our internationalization team actually an invaluable asset. In there were three of them. Now they're five, actually. So they're there to build this continuous localization pipeline. And I'm there as a product manager to actually set up this software. But because of my localization industry experience, I'm also acting literally as a localization manager, doing the now the analysis of what which language or which locales are, should be supported, as such. So at this moment, it's five of us and we are locked in to add traditional roles to the process immediately, we will build upon this and see where it leads, because it's continuous localization, and maybe the rounds wants to be different. So I'm gonna hold the game for a while and then see actually where we need most help. Of course, as previous ecostyle, we collaborate intensively and intensely with the other departments, they're actually our clients. That's how we have to view it. And they have, there's many of the marketing, product marketing, sales, of course, and product, and their needs matter. And but they differ greatly based, also for the types of content, the way they deliver it, the frequency and that kind of stuff. So we have to talk a lot to that really learn about the need to really sell localization to them, which is actually in the panel today.

Kathrin Bussmann 14:17
Well, so we're talking about you know, how to sell localization within your company. I'd like to get a sense of from each one of you How To what extent do you find that you still have to sell localization? Is it still an uphill battle? I know, Christina talked about her experience at Skyscanner at her local world, presidency, local session. And it was really interesting, actually. Christina, maybe you can give us a recap of how you went about trying to get more buy in more recognition, first of all, and then buy in from upper management at Skyscanner for the localization team and what you were trying to do and trying to get them to appreciate you know how how crucial your role is for the overall success of the company really in its global gross.

Hristina Racheva 15:06
Yeah, and I was just actually listening thinking now as everyone was speaking, I realized all of us here on this panel, we obviously have done an amazing job of selling our teams, because in our services, because we all have internationalization teams, for example, which it's really, you know, maybe some of our listeners might get the impression that this is the default in our industry and localization teams, but it's really rare to have an engineer and let alone the whole team. So I guess it speaks for, you know, for our efforts that we have done that, that work to get that. And a bit understanding us just also thinking, you know, we, there's so many different levels, I think that we do this kind of selling in this buying, because there is you know, the leadership where say what we did was just getting that or raising that awareness that we need, physically more people, a bigger team to really do everything that needs to be done, and like what we want to achieve. So there is that of just, you know, getting that permission to hire more. So that's on leadership level, but then there is on all the different levels in terms of stakeholders that we work with. And again, depending on the discipline, depending on their level, like maybe on a day to day basis, where we work, maybe with developers, but then also with engineering leaders and managers, again, will be different type of upselling, or buying or support. So, and again, there's like so many formal and informal ways to do that. And I'm just thinking of a bit more of those informal because it's kind of doing it a bit more natural way, where you suddenly get into people's skin, like, for example, talking at the coffee machine, or a drinks or dinner and kind of always finding a way to talk about localization. And then you suddenly become this person, that is the localization experts. And it's much easier for you know, for people to come and talk to you, versus our own official away, I just remember, like, recently, I was out for dinner with some of the team here in Barcelona, not just the localization team, the engineering team, and we started talking about the errors in the menu. And of course, you know, they were joking, because, of course, the localization leads will talk always about languages and translation, and someone didn't even know I was making localization, they started talking to me about the errors in the Russian translation. So you know, they never probably kind of find it difficult or wouldn't bother to raise those bugs by having these interactions, it's fantastic hormone level is also helpful.

Kathrin Bussmann 17:47
So it starts with just, you know, socializing with, with other people in the company and getting to know them, you know, one on one, and, and making sure they know what your role is at the company so that when they do have a localization related problem, they feel comfortable reaching out to you directly, instead of you know, asking around so who, you know, who does this,

Hristina Racheva 18:10
this kind of informal, right, because we also something that we did recently, as our department, we have those weekly sessions is a department and from time to time, we have those quizzes and being time. So I recently did one on language. So again, just trying to kind of pass your agenda in a very subtle and fun way. So just getting that.

Kathrin Bussmann 18:33
So networking with your colleagues. Sure, yeah. What would you add to that? Have you have you found that you've you're still having to justify the, you know, your localization budget, basically, and convince upper management that this needs to be done? Or are you kind of past that and sort of now, just kind of educating people on how you do what you do?

Julien Bertaud 18:55
No, I don't think I'll ever be bested, to be honest, at any point in the future, either. So you know, I think it's, it's the life being in localization, where there's always there's always, some people that don't really understand. Obviously, they don't, it's not that you don't understand what we do. But it's also like, understanding what are the benefits from it is another issue and I think that's where there's more of a disconnect between the people that are in the industry and the people that are like, I would say that that that we serve directly. But some of the few things like and again, Christina has been spot on so far. And yeah, like, day to day networking is really important for for like, all the people that you will interact with and getting the information that you will need to be able to perform your job as a localization pm or localization manager or whatnot like on a daily basis. In what I would like to add is a couple of things. The first is that when when you want to sell yourself, sell your team, sell again, like validate your budget to C suite level or execs in your company. One very important thing to do. And it's true for localization, I think it's super everything nowadays is, again, backup, what you're saying with data, right? When you want to sell the position, and you want to say, I need to hire somebody for this locale, or when they want to support this, okay, in the future, like, how do you do this is that you need to prove the value of adding that lookout on I did that person to team. And so at Roblox, we have a certain like, way of doing this. So we look at, like, there's so much so much data, and you need to find what relates to the people in your company, what will sell you, finding those at that point is really important, and really is a key for success, for me, at least in my opinion, in being able to get what you want. And the other thing I wanted to add, and it starts from like, way before you even start your position. And something that I've been doing, the last rule that I had, is when you do interview for the role that you want, being in localization, do, like try to get a sense as to how important the international growth is for that company that you're trying to work for. Because some company will try to hire some people in location, but again, no real understanding what entails to and what needs to be done to be successful in localization. So it is also part of your role to ensure that they do understand and that it's aligned with what you are looking for, and what you believe is the right way to do it. I mean, you won't get all the insert your interview process, but you you should get a clearer idea of whether or not you will be able to get the backup and all the support you need from your company.

Kathrin Bussmann 21:41
And I guess depending on who you're approaching, you need to present the right kind of data, you have to first understand what what do they care about, like what kind of data do they care about? And it depending on who you're talking to, it's going to be different kinds of data, right?

Julien Bertaud 21:54
That's exactly right. I mean, we have at Roblox second year document, we have so many stakeholders. And again, it's trying to validate like, do we need somebody for like more on their site and somebody to actually transition and somebody to talk with our developers? Like, what do we need? And how does it get in? How do we present these two? Yeah, so that's exactly right. Is finding the correct data to the for the correct person? Is the data point for the correct person? It's like, yeah, that's not you this mapping for everyone to make sure that you get heard and you get understood.

Kathrin Bussmann 22:26
That's the first rule of sales and marketing. Right? Know your audience. Know your audience. Sorry. Yeah. So Mira, what would you what would you add to that? What tell me about the situation at at infobel? Are you? Are you kind of struggling to validate what you do? Or is it sort of a given that this needs to be done? And you have the budget? You need to do it? Or like, what's the situation? And what what are your challenges that didn't feel good right now,

Semir Mehadzic 22:59
listening to Julian and you remember the thing in a TV show, don't play the game game, play the man, you actually want to explain something, don't explain localization, talk about what that person cares about what matters to them the most. And given the number of stakeholders we typically have, our stories do not necessarily resemble each other. When we're talking to different stakeholders, I would say that at this point, we are in a good position, because we do understand the value of localization. And we have had already efforts in opposition, we see the feedback and the push is somewhere to do some things better. So I have to admit that in the at this point, it's easy for me to even find the data, you show the data that confirms the direction that we need to go into. But the management responsible for this part is really aware of the problems. They're listening probably to the feedback from the field. And they they're getting this disinformation. So that's really good for me, and good for the company. But of course, how that's that's one good prerequisite, the job still needs to be done. You have to go out talk to people, you use their languages, the things that matter to them. When I talk to management, you have to use the numbers, the data and examples from the field really, complaints by big potential buyers who need require language in order to get in business. We need to get these examples practical examples. Not theoretical, it's important. No, this client, we would have lost it if we hadn't had that conversation. That's what we need. I found that it works with with management without departments or take lines within the company. The recipe is really simple. Just reach out on your own by yourself and listen to their people pain points. You don't have to push any agenda, you really just need to take in what they will tell you, because they will tell you that if they work in the field with the people, they will have feedback, both good feedback, and of course, the bad one. So the material just comes in. And for everyone else in the company that's really not among your primary stakeholders, actually, just like Christina said, it really, it's good to be the localization guy, the language guy in the company or person to be the image of the localization department in your company, because people will have questions, even if it's not related to them, they would like to know about certain stuff, it's good to build this internal, let's say, the contact confronting language related, it's a bit more work, but it's actually quite enjoyable.

Kathrin Bussmann 25:49
Well, let's think about, you know, before we process

Hristina Racheva 25:56
so this kind of just thought of something as I was listening. But, you know, we often all localization teams often struggle and think that we don't have the visibility, we're not involved at the beginning, we're not considered and something interesting to observe recently, when you talk to different disciplines, it's actually a bit shocking, because UX writers are like, you know, we need to be involved at the beginning, we need to work with design from the very beginning. And then there was product marketing, again, we need to be worked at the beginning product needs to inform us, for us to people to find the campaign user researchers, again, talking to product managers, you need to get us at the beginning for us to think about the actual users before you started building the product. And you realize that, you know, we think we are like kind of the victims, maybe you're the ones that are not understood, but there's so many other disciplines that are involved in building a product that are pretty much in the same situation. And this is where a person like data and everything else is the kind of the getting allies and partnering with some of these maybe and then you know, you'll be like bigger group, a bigger voice. And that's what I shared, like the local presentation. And what we do is we partner with the UX writing the copywriting team, because right, creating the copy in English, they obviously call for the same goals as us getting that high quality, efficient content. So that was like really, really helpful. And I've heard of other teams pretty much doing that, like pairing with another discipline. And it could be any discipline within the organization that I'm suffering from something similar, or that could be one that can help push your agenda forward. So really partnering with another discipline.

Kathrin Bussmann 27:43
Well, think back to sort of your, your, your journey to getting where you are now at your company with sort of the recognition that you have within the company. Were there certain kind of aha moments along the way, where you kind of gained a very important insight into how to, you know, sell localization to company internal stakeholders, where there's some sort of breakthrough moments in your own mind where you went, Okay. When I, if I put it this way, people respond or people get it, you know, send me or let's start with you. Oh, you're on mute.

Semir Mehadzic 28:23
Yeah, yeah, I was. Actually, I was always kind of feeling that this language that you use and examples that you use, should be adapted to people. And then I kind of tried it in my everyday impression that the aha moment was really for me not even really two months or months ago, I read Natalie Kelly's article about avoiding talking about localization and saying, Hey, let's make this work for multiple markets, saying, hey, let's localize this. Just say let's make this work for multiple markets. It's the aha moment in the sense of yeah, I've been on the on the right track. And it really it can go even further than I expected. And coming from from, from someone like Natalie and from a company like HubSpot. It's really really good signal. how things might be tackled?

Kathrin Bussmann 29:16
Yeah, Natalie's blog is just fantastic. Anyone who's not following it yet? I highly recommend not Natalie Kelly's born to be global blog. It's just fantastic. Sure, yeah. What would you what would you tell us about? Have you had like, these aha moments where you kind of had this, this personal breakthrough of okay, this is how I can move the needle to getting people to understand why this is so important. Um, so

Julien Bertaud 29:44
I wish he was in the habit of I don't know if I would qualify as this but again, I think yeah, like, it goes back to little what I was saying earlier is like really understanding and those happen almost every day, right? It's understanding the people you work with how to do To break, like to make them understand what you need or what you want, I just take all the level and I think that's, that's really a, a never ending learning piece where it's like because everybody's different, and everybody has their own way of understanding things. It's really like understanding how to break through someone every day. I mean, there are obviously some similarities between people. But this is really like, the most important thing to me is trying to communicate with other people and make them understand the need of localization and how localization is important to them, and why it is important to them. To it to that point, I would say that, more often than not, I mean, not much to another side as well. But in very often, when you talk with people in product, or people in marketing or anything like that, the best way to make them understand why localization is important, it should be important to them, is to show them what would happen if you had no localization or if you had bad localization and the the negative impact that you would have on their product, but the deliverable and how bad it would look to the people they're trying to reach out. But like our users, customer, whichever it is, like, making understand like, if you have bad transmission, if you have no translation, no localization, no culture is like this is what would happen, this is the potential negative impact that you're doing for you and for the company. And I think they like the scare tactics kind of a little bit, but not that hard. But that tends to work quite a bit.

Kathrin Bussmann 31:41
I've seen what would you add to that? Is there something that you found to be particularly effective, that you kind of discovered along the way, this is some sort of way to explain it, or particular tactics that work well, with specific stakeholders in your company?

Hristina Racheva 31:59
You have been similar to what Julian just said, around, you know, not explaining what will happen if you don't do right, or what's the impact of that. But also, I guess it's, again, normal for smaller teams, you know, for us, in our case, now, we are kind of a big team now, right? Eight people, but it's just over a year and a half, two years ago, we were three, and for the languages that we do for the size of the company, it's it was really, really intense, and not enough time to do everything and do the things right are going to have proper processes and tools. So it was really discouraging, almost right to can't do a great job if you don't have the tools and the processes to enable you to do that. So kind of my usual approach would be, again, out any opportunity I would get or talk to leadership meets middle leadership about the problem that we have, but it was always a bit seen almost like a ranting, oh, this is not working, or we don't have these are these people don't want to work with us. And, you know, to a degree, it works because the people see you leadership sees you, but it just they, you know, it's perceived a bit of a negative. And once it was during actual interviewing for our team, and there was someone that said, You shouldn't go to managers with problems, you should go with solutions. And it just kind of hit me is like, oh, yeah, that makes so much sense. Of course, you know, if you complain, or rants or present, the negative and things are not working, of course, it's not their job, your management team to find a solution to what you're presenting. It's like, yeah, it's your job to tell them what's not working. And what do you think we'll do better, we're better and get the support to enable you with that. So it's, it's been around that I'm going to them with solutions or with winning pockets. And

Kathrin Bussmann 33:52
don't be a complainer, be a problem solver.

Hristina Racheva 33:56
It's hard, right? Like, we're always the one person with two people in the company. It's hard not to do that.

Kathrin Bussmann 34:03
Well, I want to leave time at the end for some questions. But before we do that, I'd like to ask each one of you put yourself in the shoes of you know, this classic case of sort of the one person localization team at a startup right at a tech startup. The localization team consists of this one person, I know it's not rare. And put yourself in their shoes. How would you in that situation? go about building the profile of localization at your company like what where would you direct your efforts? I mean, because you're only one person, there's only so much you can do. And you only have so much time in the day and resources but like what, what would be your best strategy to try to build the localization of the profile of localization and make sure that people know who you are in And how important your role is at the company. Let's start with you, Christina.

Hristina Racheva 35:07
Yes, I will say something, which is really and you just said earlier was, you know, your part part of your role you said is to help the company understand the importance of localization. And I think it's the same thing here is, you know, if we localization people are like, really efficient and can find solutions to anything, anything you throw at us, we can find ways to localize any type of content. So we're almost doing it to our detriment. And it's like, really, the fact of if you don't raise awareness, that one person is not enough. And that's too much work. And it is like really a big endeavor to enable localization. And you cannot expect one person to do it. So it's really up to you to of course, do your job. But also, as much as possible, raise awareness about the effort, it takes the importance of bit of not doing it right, and just getting that support from leadership to grow your team and to bring people in you to to help you. So that

Kathrin Bussmann 36:10
same year, what would you what would you say to that one person localization team, to give them some hope of, you know, building up that that recognition within the company?

Semir Mehadzic 36:21
Yeah, I can only agree with what he's been doing up to the point, I will suggest, we have learned somehow to be Jack of all trades. I think we all are in that situation. So I would recommend that you really hone the gates as much as you can. But then when you feel the pressure, then look what where someone could help you. And maybe even where you're weak sides are, and then use these two arguments as an as a justification for bringing someone else on board. Not just I'm too busy. Give me a mini or copy. For me the true divide will really get someone to enrich your team, because all of us are where have certain blends of knowledge that we can combine together.

Kathrin Bussmann 37:11
Yeah, how about you? What would you say to that? That stressed out one person localization team?

Julien Bertaud 37:18
Yeah, I mean, you know, honestly, I think, what one very important thing too, if you are that 1% In any startup, or any company, really, because there are more than just started to have that type of set up, unfortunately, really, I would say, tooling, like, you may be one person that you should be able to find in jail, like some engine, like some engineering that whether it's in your team or not like people that you know, and to help you with tooling, implementing like tooling in your process and automate as much as you can. Like this is going to be what will save you down, like down the road in terms of like sanity, health, like because it gets it takes a toll that you can we now have great tools like this, the localization industry has just evolved so much in the last, I would say the last decade, they just seem in the last five years, the progress in technology has been it's been great. And yeah, just try to, to use tools and try to at least if you cannot get someone else, try to get buy in on on on tooling and automation for your processes. that will that will be a great help. That's what I would say.

Kathrin Bussmann 38:39
Fantastic. Well, I think we have some time for questions. And I'm just looking through the questions here in the q&a. Some are more relevant to our topic than others. And I, I'll be honest, I haven't had a chance to look through all them, but I see one that's quite relevant. So from Luis Hara Herrera, he asks, Do you think explaining localization in terms of UX makes it easier to understand the value that localization has, what would you say? We'll go back to usually?

Julien Bertaud 39:11
Yeah, sure. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's a great point. And it's very important. And we tend to do this. Today at Roblox again says we are like more of a PC or some other social platform user experience and like touch and feel of the app is really important. But yeah, and I think he does a great way in communicated the need, and the value of localization and also pinpointing some of the issues that we can get when trying to localize content. But yeah, like I think that's a great that's a great method of really selling what you have a what you want to do in software.

Hristina Racheva 39:46
You can even like pass that almost backed up to the UX team designers and researchers and kind of use it against them because you know, they're all about user experience. And what I like saying is, do you you know, you If you think about users and all users, do you mean all English speaking users are all your international users? And you know, kind of using that against them in a way. It's like if we do care about our users, then we should care about our international users and have that in mind.

Kathrin Bussmann 40:18
Samir, would you add something to that?

Semir Mehadzic 40:20
Yeah, this metaphor, this comparison with UX is a great one. And it would work with someone who is aware of UX problems. And it's important, if you, but not all, people are responding to the UX as such, or customer experience. So like I said, it's a good vehicle to bring this bell to people who are not maybe into localization that are into UX designers, developer front end development. It's, again, one of the ways to approach different types of stakeholders during the belt.

Kathrin Bussmann 40:58
A couple of people have asked, I'm just paraphrasing, but like, what are some metrics, some types of data that you can collect, that are helpful in demonstrating the value of localization? And how important it is to as the global growth of the company sent me are? Like, why don't you start?

Semir Mehadzic 41:19
Here? I mean, we already the localization is necessary, there is a distinction that no one has so far mentioned, it does depend whether your your product is for end customers, you know, viewers for is for business, I mean, of course, language has to be there, but it's not the same importance. Or this during a reinforcing the statement by underway project, underway, a project by NZ, actually. We work with business to difference. So for us, we, we can talk to our end customers, because there's not too many of them in there in 1000s, but it's not millions, because it's businesses within users there so we can get feedback from there. That's that's the language if we do not have the language does, does it prevent their users, their companies to get the most out of our platform? We do surveys, for example, in our courtroom with the current translation, how people are happy with it, and we even offered, okay, for those of us not happy, which is the most problematic for you. And for example, I can tell you this, their most convenient most for finding occasional English sentences within the local library, somewhere somewhere, we found it and they have actually given these results to us. So we can work with this type of data not linked. Everything should be perfectly translated. That's theoretical, but coming up with data, how the existing users are reacting, are we losing deals because of lack of some language? That also happened once? So that's the kind of thing that you think that's actually the answer. You

Kathrin Bussmann 43:07
should yeah, what kinds of data do you kind of use to make a case for the processes that you want to implement at Roblox?

Julien Bertaud 43:15
Yeah, so I mean, in terms of like, localization, and whether it's adding a new look out or seeing like, what where should we go next? I Roblox I mean, we look for different different data, different metrics. The key one, I would say, is really like, what is your user base in the country? Really, and it's, again, think like, what is the current users that we have? And what is the potential amount of users that we can have? If we were to go into that market? And really understanding, really just making the what is the ROI of going there, and how to prove that I think we use just at the end of the day that that really what it is, is how can we serve the most people possible? And well, which, which, which territories actually want us to go there as well? I think it's really important this goes goes back to knowing your audiences. Is your audience ready for your product? Do they really have a demand for your product? I mean, are you able to service it as well? I think he's just what it comes down to.

Kathrin Bussmann 44:22
Christina what what what have you kind of been collecting in the way of metrics or data that basically demonstrates you know, if not ROI, and at least, you know, the value of even if it's more intangible, not so much in monetary terms with the the importance of what you're doing, through localization at Skyscanner?

Hristina Racheva 44:45
Now, I'll quickly touch on that we you know, we have access to data around what percentage of our users come from non English speaking countries, what percentage of our revenue so we have over 60% of our revenues from non English speaking markets 70% of our users from non English speaking market. So, you know, those are the usual things. But one thing I want to add a bit, in addition to what was said is, you know, we talked about the, the why we should do localization and how to prove it, but also there is an aspect of how to do localization and, and, you know, all the aspects on the technological aspect on the processes on the tooling. And that, you know, kind of enables also localization strategy. So there is also that aspect of how do we get a buy into, to invest in tooling to invest in processes to, to support adoption, and that's all around the enablement. so easily. There are things around, you know, how long does it take to cert to do certain things with a localization team? How long would it take with with a new tool, and also enablement for other teams? Because, you know, we all say as well, that are stakeholders, their main job is not localization, right? Developers should be building the product. So how long does it take them to, to request content to integrate the content? So looking at those kinds of metrics, and you know, we've we've done that, for example, looking at, instead of looking at your regular turnaround time, we're looking at end to end turnaround time. And by enabling our tooling, now, we've reduced the end to end turnaround time for our developers, by 35%, how long it takes them to get the string. So you know, there are so many aspects. So looking at the how and the tooling and the processes is also a good type of data to use for investment.

Kathrin Bussmann 46:34
To what extent does localization get involved in the conversation that happens sort of at the sea level around? You know, what's the next step for like Skyscanner? In your case? You know, where do we want to expand into next, you know, what to do? Do you get consulted? Is that something where you are asked to contribute to the conversation?

Hristina Racheva 46:55
Yeah, absolutely. We recently looking at that, where, which one was should we launch next, and it was actually an equal conversation between our team, we're looking at the cost, the turnaround time, the processes that will take the marketing and SEO team in terms of obviously, they're the ones that have the data around users and sessions and potential markets, between our commercial teams in terms of commercial agreements that we have in each country. So it's a really a very complete, kind of have a team that looks at that from different angles. So it's, we are part of that team that drives this decision and makes a decision.

Kathrin Bussmann 47:36
Should you have about you, is the localization team involved in those kinds of higher level decisions, the most strategic kind of business decisions around international growth?

Julien Bertaud 47:46
Yes, definitely. As I mentioned earlier, like now, my team is working with our business unit into what the discussion of like, what country should we should we work, like, should we look into doing as well as what type of partnership in a given country should we do as well? Like we definitely like we are a main part of the discussion there. But again, I would say that this to be quite honest, it's it's another topic, but it's becoming more and more complex subject on how to be in a new territory right now. Just there's so many local local laws that are emerging, that make it really, really hard. And it's very interesting, actually. Really interesting topic into how to be compliant. And globally. They will definitely be bobbing the topic.

Kathrin Bussmann 48:39
Yeah. Samir, last word to you what? To what extent are you involved in higher level kind of conversations around the strategic direction that Infogroup wants to take with in terms of global growth?

Semir Mehadzic 48:54
Since we're short on time, we are taking into account and we do participate in these kind of decisions action, where right now in such a random analysis of the markets, we have a specific business model. That means that we are mostly already in a country with some operator partners already operating there. We also have the sense parts of the market already there before we actually decide to acquire them. We are not selling anything, but we are there in the market. So we have the feedback from the field and that's really working well for us. That's kind of short.

Kathrin Bussmann 49:34
No, I think we're at time Well, this was a great conversation. Thank you. All three of you for being available making yourselves available. Yeah, being on the on the Pacific coast to get up maybe 730. So I got up at four in the morning Toronto time.

Bryan Montpetit 49:51
So thank you, everyone. I really, really appreciate it. That was a fantastic panel. So, thank you, Catherine, thank you for wonderful job as moderator that was great, respected and respected time to so thank you very much