Changing perspective from Company to Product/ Service (Macro to Micro)

So maybe you’ve found this mildly interesting if you are actually in a position to move a whole company’s localization processes or you’re good at imagining such opportunities into existence.  But I don’t expect the opportunities I had come along often or they can be made.

More likely you work in a siloed organization on a single product or service that needs to be localized. How do you apply anything I’ve said so far to your daily work? Great question and one I will address in the next few posts. Before I begin those however, I want to set the scenario and give a quick overview as to why whole enterprise localization design can be used on a single service, feature, or product. But to do so you’ll need to suspend your disbelief for a moment.

Below is the framework for the next few posts so you can see a high-level overview of what I will cover and how this fits into the larger framework.

1. What is your why?  What is the impetus driving the desire to support a global customer base?
2. Data inputs you must understand before you do a customer and a data journey assessment.
   1. Product Roadmap
   2. Quality expectations
   3. Development tools and processes
   4. Localization tools and processes
   5. View of teams you will collaborate with. For example, will you work with or will you leverage the work of content, marketing, development, or other localization teams?
3. Customer Journey and Data Journey: Following customer interactions with and expectations of your systems is a study of your product.  Following the data how you store it; what you use it for; and, what other systems depend on the data is a study of your architecture.  These two processes will frame all of the other work you do.
   1. Assessment
      1. Tools
      2. Systems
      3. People
      4. Costs
      5. Short and long-term plans
      6. Current production process

You’ll note the above list is really a granular look at your product or service, but even this view of the world gives you a very good understanding of how what you do is related to the overall goals of the company and it will allow you to get a partial understanding of how the company thinks about localization. At this point, one of the more interesting things to do is to begin thinking about what data will matter to the C-Level and figuring out how to build that data. Very rarely is the data you will need to convince the C-Level readily available. So your job is to solve the current problems and figure out how to build what you need for the larger discussions.

There’s a lot packed into this process so I’ll unwind it in the next few posts by looking at how to make it work on a specific (albeit imaginary product).