Wow! It was incredible to head to #thealignment live in london with Phrase yesterday. We heard from some INCREDIBLE speakers and panellists who helped us identify, categorize and solve the problems we’d associate with global products and global product management. 

Our speakers included:

• Ronald Cummings-John, the CEO of Global App Testing
• Edmund Ovington, Global Vice President at Phrase
• Millie Zah, Head of Product at DAZN
• Vibha Sridhar, Senior Group Product Manager at Just Eat
• Patricia Fragoso, Senior Director at Salesforce
• Craig Wood, Senior Program Manager at Expedia
• Ashwin Rao, Senior Product Manager at PayPal

Thanks to everybody who came. Here's what we heard:

Our biggest takeaways

You should take on big risks, big challenges, and have confidence that you’ll succeed

While most of the alignments we’ve done have focused on l10n-specific insight, I was struck by how much of this event suggested ways of delivering global growth by thinking about one’s own role, place, and cultivating a culture of experimentation and leadership. 

Millie Zah, the Head of Product at DAZN (pronounced “Da Zone”) talked about how she applied her entrepreneurial mindset into product manager roles – and focused on staying open-minded, listening to the same resources as clients, and setting aside time to think about the big picture in order to continue to drive suggestions about delivering growth without getting bogged down in process.

Sometimes thinking big can help you think small

Vibha Sridhar, the Senior Group Product Manager at Just Eat, expressed something similar: her experiences thinking about sustainable growth for Just Eat. When a company has been through a period of unsustainable growth, it can be disorienting to begin to plan for the future, and this is what happened with Just Eat in the pandemic. (We expressed a similar story on our recent podcast.

To help think abouTo help think about what to do next, Vibha found that defining an end state was the most useful way that she was able to communicate clearly about the product roadmap. 

L10n is an incredible growth driver for enterprise products... and you can find user differences in some surprising places

If you want to grow globally, you should be localizing! Craig Wood, the Localization Program Manager for Expedia, took us through some of the different design preferences and styles of different countries and identified how they differ. 

Take this example from Japan:

Craig explained some of the ways Expedia was starting to tackle this problem and the progress they had made on their Japanese UI. 

Ronald Cummings-John, the CEO of Global App Testing, gave some other interesting examples covered in our recent 2024 product brief all about globalization. He identified the way that some organizations think about data and device type to identify what kinds of product to serve different groups of user. You can see every user category as an opportunity for growth: it's just a case of testing for it.

Challenges in localization are hard. But they are not unique

When the audience was polled at the end, one of the biggest takeaways was that a lot of the thinking about leadership, innovation, and building a commercial case for yourself we had done was also applicable in localizatoin.

Individual contributors argued that everybody can do a better job of building a case for themselves and evangelising their work. 

Thank you to everyone who attended

We'd like to thank everybody who attended the alignment. It was a superb event – and we hope to see you at the  next one! 

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