Transcription
Ketty Tirrito 00:00
Okay so today we would like to talk about this index approach to the collaboration between localization, product and engineering. However, before we do so, we would like to introduce ourselves. My name is Kathy Leto. I'm a team lead in the localization team based in Dublin, India. And when I don't work on localization, Zendesk, I really like to learn about other languages and cultures. And I love traveling. And if I was asked, What are the two favorite things in the world me are probably the plants and pizza. There is no with you. Yeah,
Sirisha Neduri 00:43
thank you, Katie. Hello, everyone. My name is Sirisha Neduri. I'm a senior localization quality engineer at Sanders based in Seattle, United States. I love cooking and trying new things. That's my happy place. Traveling is another of my favorite things to do. And recent hobby that I started during pandemic is growing my own little foot in my own little backyard garden. So let's see what's Zendesk. So Zendesk has a cloud based CRM application. Zendesk was built on a simple idea to create customer service solution, which was easy to use and accessible to everyone. So we expanded on that idea, with a growing number of products that work together to improve customer relationships and can be embedded and extended with open development platforms. The evolution of Zendesk so Zendesk was founded in 2007 in Copenhagen, Denmark, by three friends more than pintle Mykines. One and Alexandria gossiper. It shifted its headquarters to San Francisco in 2009. And by 2014, it grew internationally with 600 plus employees. As of 2021, we have 6000 employees, and 112,000 and counting more customers supporting 30 plus ui languages. Thank you.
Ketty Tirrito 02:05
So the topics we'll be looking at today are, first of all, some introductions about the globalization and the engineering team. To give you an idea of where the two teams are based and how they frame how they work together. We will then present some of the challenges of these collaboration. And we'll also go through three main category of solutions, which we grouped under engaging, supporting and teaming up. For a festival, what is globalization? So the globalization is Zendesk, it's made up of two teams, the internationalization ICANN team, which is the engineering side of localization, and the localization team responsible for the delivery of localized content. The overall objective of the team is to invest in scalability, flexibility and automation to serve the customers international leads we've already seen on the screen, where is the globalization team located? It's located across four continents, five countries and 10 different time zones, which makes for very fun, team meetings. It's 24 people and we speak both languages, most of them over 12 languages, most of them have most of which may be the next slide. The look the globalization team I've ever as never always been. It's not always been this big. So it was created in 2012. When Zendesk was still a ticket tracking system, the internationalization team was established by one engineer that hired the first internationalization quality engineer. It was in 2008, between 2012 and 2017, that the internationalization team grew up outside the US to breach their collaboration gap between the local and the internationalization team and the engineering teams that were starting to be established. In Europe for example. In in 2017, the localization on the internet the localization team was created, and it was placed on the program management. So for the first time, internationalization was separated into two teams localization and internationalization. And internationalization remains under engineering. In 2019, something very important for the for the for the wider team happened, the localization team was moved under Product Management. I say it was something quite important. It's because that provided the team with an even more increased So visibility of on the lifecycle of products. In 2020, it's when the localization and internationalization teams joined forces together and they became what we know today. The Globalization team, which is still as of today led by the same internationalization quality engineer that was the first author and is today as senior director.
Sirisha Neduri 05:33
Next, engineering team has centers so engineering team is mainly responsible for building and maintaining the software that actually powers our customer facing products. We have a geo distributed team of engineers the ever growing engineering team currently have we have 1400 plus engineers with 175 Plus Scrum teams. We have a physical offices with eight countries and seven different time zones. But apart from our physical presence, we also have a larger presence of our remote employees throughout the globe and into even more different time zones. Next, we are going to talk about some of the challenges that we face in our day to day operations. Such as localization awareness, localization awareness is a constant challenge. The the main focus is always to release the products to the market, like why it is important. Usually products are not globalized at the feature development. The localization scope is de prioritized, because a lot of engineering teams are working on other higher priority features. Next with ever growing engineering team, so as our company is growing and the demand for our products, we have lot of new engineering teams to support this growth. So there is very levels of understanding between teams for best practices or localization workflows. Even localization value is different between these teams. So what we observed is some products have more issues than the others, which also, in turn affects our product localization aspects. Continuing with the same challenge, like as we are adding our engineering teams who are developing more features pretty quickly, so it's difficult for us to scale up or to support their needs. So sometimes we have limited projects visibility with upcoming projects where we are not able to engage with those teams, and the features are releasing without localization. Next, varied approaches, as we all are following agile practices, but having different execution approaches are different deployment schedules. For example, some product teams have a shorter sprint cycles of two weeks, but other teams might have a larger four week sprint cycles. So it creates an overhead for localization team to support these teams individually with their own operating models. And last some local general localization constraints such as localized stability issues, where strings are hard coded and not externalized layout issues such as truncation or concatenation issues, and also supporting complex RTL layouts. So do you identify or relate with any of these challenges? Next, Katie would be sharing how we have mitigated these challenges with some of our solutions.
Ketty Tirrito 08:34
Thank you. So in case you have found any of these challenges to read the neck to resonate with, with your situation, we really hope that the following solutions can help you mitigate these challenges, just like they're helping us. So the first category of solution is about engaging, as endlessly found that it's extremely important to have our upper management really engaged right from the get going of any product development, to identify where the globalization team can support with their efforts to achieve localized optimal localized content. Our upper management is really involved in high levels, stakeholder conversations, to agree what are the terms to to influence and educate our our stakeholders when it comes to localization. At the same time, these upper management engagement is always backed up with data about localization. So information such as how many customers are using our product in languages that are not English, and above all, what is the revenue that is generated from non English speaking customers? When it comes to engineering, it's really important to be there whenever the engineers join Zendesk and so they go through a process of onboarding or And right from the from the very first date. And the globalization team is present in those on boardings, just with a simple slide to explain what is the mission of the team, and to give a snapshot of how they will be collaborating with local with localization and globalization. At the same time, we also prepare an engaging tailored presentation, what we also call refreshes to strengthen the knowledge of the engineering and wider product teams when it comes to globalization. So in that presentation, which are mainly addressed to individual Scrum teams, or to new joiners, typically, we present information such as what is the mission and the importance of the globalization team in the wider organization, how we interact with different stakeholders in the product development pipelines. Also how strings should be extracted to avoid serious issues when when it comes to localizing the content, we also show some of the most common bugs and ways and we provide some insights to ways of overcoming those issues. And then, of course, organizes at Tech Summit. Once a year, it's an opportunity for product from product managers or the wider product organization in the engineering team to meet up and share talks and presentations with each other. The Globalization team tries to be present with some presentations every year. And we've been talking about collaborations but also some of the most interesting technologies that we've been employing, such as machine translation. Every every six months, something a bit more lighthearted and entertaining, we share the locally the globalization newsletter with a wider organization. So with key stakeholders, we share information such as who has joined our team, and also some important achievements of the wider globalization team. And also we include a small paragraph about globalization because we have a method and to remind everybody about our mission and the scope of our job. We reached out we'll be presenting another category of solutions now.
Sirisha Neduri 12:22
Thank you getting so after engaging with the product and engineering teams, we also support them throughout our product development stages. Let's see how so we team up with our internationalization our it nine team. So we have a dedicated ITN team who looks after the global readiness of our products, who also helped maintain and manage the translation management tools. They provide education and to our engineers with any ITN related issues or international coding issues or any localization best practices. So for example, incorporating CLDR local data into the products or how to fix any item and related issues with the product or how to set up any repos for translations. Also, we involve internationalization team to solve any complex design challenges. For example, in one of our product where we had a complex design involving multiple languages, support across multiple product integration, so I can team was involved to help design and development teams. Next process documentation is very essential to our team. It acts as a point of reference and can be shared across the teams. Given we have a geo distributed teams, we take this to our advantage to create consistent workflows, we try to document everything targeting product engineering design teams and as well as for ourselves. Next, we also have a dedicated communication channels. This is like tailored support. So if the product teams wanted to reach or have a separate request related to products are beat creating project related discussions, or to reach out to the land language experts directly so and many more like we have different channels to reach out and cater to separate requests. Next, I'm going to share a key solution that we are where we implement at Zendesk is how localization are we have involved or embedded ourselves into each and every stage of product development cycle, right from discovery to release? In discovery phase, we try to learn about the feature or who is the team? And what are the project challenges and any project milestones. So we actually build upon our localization strategy during this time. Apart from that, we also I'm engaged in feature renaming or international suitability or international research. For example, for one of our products center scatter, we were consulted to review the international suitability of the product name in other languages, because usually send us product names are not translated. So we engaged with language experts to provide the international feedback to the product managers, who which actually helped them to find a suitable name. Next in design phase, we work very closely with UX and content designers to review the designs and provide the feedback as early as possible in the cycle such as layout issues or any design challenges such as some some design issues, some designs are like very English centric, they work really well on English UI, but not suitable on other languages. For example, that is an English expression or which is not clearly translatable into other languages. So we provided this feedback which helped design team to change it to a more meaningful language. We also provide best practices during this review, such as not using text embedded with the images, or not using initials with the icons because certain locales languages doesn't use certain cultures do not use initials. During development stage, we regularly check the English strings for any source content source source context issues or any localized stability issues. We check the source commenting to see if there is enough contextual information provided to the translators, such as do not translate plays or using if using placeholder values then need to have a clear placeholder names so that it provides enough context to the translators, if we are using any screenshots or not. Whether a string is a noun, or a verb, like that. So during this stage, we also control churn by identifying the working strings and not sending them to the translation. Apart from the reviews, we also look at the progression of the product development during this stage, and we try to plan our downstream activities such as translation and testing efforts during the stage. Next during translation, we try to supervise the quality by doing random checks of our translation quality. We also answer any context related questions by the translators during this stage. In validation, we do internationalization testing and linguistic testing to verify the localized product is working as expected. And in the last rollout phase, we do one last round of regression testing before releasing the product. Next, Katie will be sharing our next solution.
Ketty Tirrito 18:02
Thank you. So I've, final category of solution will be teaming up. So the first strategy for teaming up is that we've we've encountered and we found is to have a centralized stream database. The internationalization team, as Michelle briefly mentioned, owns and maintains the database that stores all the English why copy and also its translations, it has a double effect. First, it makes it very easy for the globalization team to have control over the strings across all the products that aren't managed as and that bold suggests that it gives some peace of mind to the engineering teams. To that they basically rely on the globalization team to manage and update translations. We also work with a fixed localization sheduled, which allows for more regular, more manageable translation jobs and makes it easier for the localization team to handle translation project. This reduces the number of last minute and urgent remarks to the minimum. And it would also and also allows the engineering teams to know exactly when some of the translations that they have recently added will be made available in the centralized string database. Another important strategy within teaming up is early localization to a these by running some quality assurance, both internally and with vendors way ahead of the release of the product. We are in a position to identify the most pressing issues related to functionality UI, and also language and to fix them before the release. However, it's not of course always possible for the engineering team to fix all the bugs at the same time that have been reported to them. So Are we, as the as the localization team, we provide the engineering team with done prioritization to every buck that is reported to them. So this will allow them to know exactly which bugs will have to be tackled as a matter of priority before release, and will also ensure that the localization team will also reassure the organization team that the most pressing bugs will actually be fixed before release. And last but not least, of closing the loop, it's essential. So it's very important to analyze the data that has been gathered by the box. By the bugs, we're hoping to identify trends and to identify the most recurring issues. And we do we do so by, of course, looking at the reports, and also identifying some ways that we can implement to help the teams so that these bugs, these issues will not occur again. And something that we really, that we really enjoy a Zendesk is the idea of the one team approach. So the idea is to have the localization team really embedded in every spam team that we work with. And we do so by attending some team meetings, but sometimes also attending from planning meetings, and also attending join testing sessions. In this scenario, you would have the English team working on testing the English why and in parallel, the localization team testing, the internationalized versions of that. Vendors in general, it's all about investing in good relationships. But in the localization team, we really take that to heart. And we partner with the case with the case stakeholders of the entire product organization, identify those deaths, those perfect synergies that will allow us to achieve better results. And something that we found very important as well is to engage in social activities by just giving up with the with the engineering team. So finally, some takeaways, we would like to wrap up by reminding that it's extremely important to engage early as early as possible in the process of localizing by having the upper management really on your side, to set the way for the best practices of localization. And at the same time explaining the why. So making backing up the importance of localization with data. Second, is also providing the support ensuring that whatever stakeholder you support, whether it's the engineering teams or any other stakeholder, you are there to give them guidance on localization, and its importance and providing the tools. So ensuring that the channel of communication is always open, and that you always available to answer questions and providing all the documentation that it's needed for them. Embedding in every stage is equally important. So it's crucial to identify the critical points in which the localization team should be involved in the development phase, and be present within in those moments to help achieve best practices at every single stage. And last but not least, the importance of investing in good relationships. We've really found that by working closely with the engineering team, who are more talented, that localization is not going to be enough of an afterthought, because they will whenever they're going to think about localization, we're going to think about that team member that helps them in achieving better goals. So really invest in good relationships. So we'd like to close with say, and saying thank you so much, and it was a pleasure to present and we hope we'll get some answers and some questions that we will be able to help with some answers.
Sirisha Neduri 23:58
Thank you. Thank you.
