From Localization to Global Experiences

[00:00:05] Speaker A: Welcome to Lang Talent, the podcast by Multilingual Media, exploring the human side of the language industry and the future of work. I'm Eddie Arrieta, CEO here at Multilingual Media, and today we're talking about a bold reframe, moving from localization to global experiences. Our guest is Jose Palomares of Coupa, who's led a 14 month transformation from service provider to growth partner, retiring the L word in favor of a function designed to drive adoption, revenue and trust in every market. Jose, welcome and thanks for being here. [00:00:42] Speaker B: Thank you. It's a lot of fun and it's a great pleasure to be invited. [00:00:47] Speaker A: Of course. And it's a great pleasure to talk to you. [00:00:50] Speaker B: You said the L word. [00:00:51] Speaker A: The L word. Yes, yes, yes. [00:00:52] Speaker B: We're going to talk about the L word. [00:00:54] Speaker A: My son saw me reading it the other day and he went to me like this. Is this the. You mean the. I'm putting. For those that are just listening, I'm putting my hand, my right hand on my forehead with the looser sign. And I was like, no, son, young boy is a different L word, one that you have not known about. And you'll read about the future tales. And of course, for those that might not know, Jose is the first person in the industry that I ever spoke to, of course, outside of the people that hire me. But I was very bold. I continue to be bold. And I messaged Jose and I said, would you jump on a phone call with me just to talk about this industry? And Jose said yes. And I was very surprised. I was very surprised that he would say yes. I was just trying. And then it gave me this idea of what this industry. I think Marjolaine mentioned it last year in an interview that we had this community that more than industries, it's a community, a group of people. And along the way, you start realize that there are many professionals in the industry that exemplify excellence and beyond excellence, a spectrum of execution, a spectrum of activities that they do. And I think some professionals limit their professional spectrum. You are a different type of professional person. Fortunately, there are other professionals that align with that type of ambition. You. You apply your talents in many different ways. So I know today we'll talk about your new role at Koopa, but can you give us also some context on all those, let's call them, layers, but also different branches of who Jose is for the industry. Renato hates these questions, by the way. I think some people in my audience are gonna be like, who is this Renato character that you keep talking to Eddie. But you've never interviewed. Well, if you're listening to this, to this level, to this dep, you will be hearing from Renato in the upcoming weeks. You will see that. But, Jose, thank you so much for doing this, and we're all yours right now. [00:02:58] Speaker B: Thank you. And part of what you will likely be hearing is Renato complaining about this interview. So I'm sure that we'll be hearing about that. I want to pick up on something that you just mentioned. So, first of all, thank you. This is a great honor. And it doesn't happen often that you're actually asked to talk about something that is, I don't know, lived experience and genuinely something that gets me out of it every day and super excited. But you mentioned the many professionals that we have. I think that the one thing that I've been trying to do different and that I keep trying to encourage people is, let's just talk about it. Let's just be open about it. We all come from very similar places. Our experiences look a lot more similar than we usually would admit. Let's just talk about it and be open and vulnerable about it. So, yes, community. I love that we're setting the framework as community building. So about myself, I hate when people actually go on an interview and they talk about what they did since kindergarten. So I'm going to focus on the same things I usually tell people is like, why should you listen to anything that I say is. Well, because within this industry, I've worn many hats. I started my career as a translator, and I wasn't necessarily one of the best translators. And I realized that fairly early on, my bilingual skills were not as good as other people. So I tried to, you know, adapt and survive. And I found other angles. I started to be the translator who could handle many cat tools. I was a translator who could do some language engineering or localization engineering. Eventually, someone told me that I could be a localizer and not only a translator, and that there was a future of where I could be making managing projects and earning commissions on just leading a group of people. And that kind of like, kicked off my entrepreneurial side of the brain when I thought, it's like, wait, wait, wait, I can decide on things like tools and just work with other translators. And then I lead that, and I get more money than anyone else does, and we build something and we loyalize customers and things like that. So that that set my evolution. I've been a project manager. I've been a localization engineer. I ended up, you know, my one of my big milestones in life is I became the Chief Technology officer of Big LSP in the or not so big at the beginning, eventually will be big in San Francisco. So I'm originally from Barcelona, Spain. That's why I speak funny in English. But eventually I moved to the US to actually help build this a tech oriented lsp. And I did my longest time in there, more than 10 years. And recently I moved on to the buyer side recently, it's about seven years now. And I work now for a company called Koopa, as you really well pronounced, that basically builds financial management software. And my responsibility is to just lead all of the localization activities or as we like to say nowadays, global experiences. Right. And I'm also very involved. I am part of the Globalization and Localization Association. So I am the current chair to the board of directors at GALA at that association. And again, that is. That is perhaps another reason why I feel entitled to talk to people about what is going on in the industries. Because thanks to that role, it's easy for me to hear about everything that is happening at all layers of the industry. That is my identity. I work on enterprise. I've done a lot of things and I support GALA and the community at large with that kind of never ending volunteering that I invite everyone to partake on. [00:06:36] Speaker A: That is great. Thank you so much. And we can never get enough of getting to hear about each other's backgrounds. And I'm really sure that especially those that are new to the industry, they really appreciate that level of texture that we go into the conversation and you've mentioned you come from a translator and then realizing this localization conversation that it existed, but now you're retiring the L localization word. How did it, how did that come about? What was, what was that process of transformation? I think that it's. [00:07:10] Speaker B: It comes from the accumulated experience of yes, I've been doing this for over 25 years now. This is what my career has been mostly about. It's different flavors of it that's doing the same thing for more than 25 years. And over those 25 years, I keep having to explain to people what localization means. I'm not happy that someone would call it translation because that is only a side of it. And localization is just not straightforward. If you know what it is, it could be. I think that the word for it is like it's self limiting. You keep using this term that. Yes, it made sense 25 years ago when I started on this. Someone said there is something more beyond translation. And it's localization. And that's why I adopted it. I adopted it because it was more than translation. It was caring about other things beyond the language. The truth is that over the last 15 years of my career, I've come to realize that it is slowing us down. That is a word that doesn't do any good. Actually, in this exercise of rebranding as something else, I did the exercise of checking with a lot of people, what do you think about changing the word that we use for it? And people disagreed on what to use instead, but no one disagreed. And I asked something like 60 people about that change, and no one said, no, localization is good. Everybody had a bad experience either understanding it if they were not from the industry, or articulating what localization is and why it's valuable. And it's not just translation. So I just thought that it was a good business decision to try and kill that word. That has never been helpful. [00:08:38] Speaker A: And how hard. How hard is it to kill a dinosaur? It must be. It must be pretty tough to go through that very old skin. [00:08:45] Speaker B: Yeah, but it's like any other jargon, right? In this space. I've come to see that, to come to realize that, to understand each other. We love using our jargon. The problem is when we present a jargon to people who don't care, who don't get it, and who really shouldn't. So every time that I find myself explaining localization to someone, I couldn't help but ask myself, why does this person need to know everything that we do to achieve a result? That it's very clear in their mind, and that is part of this transformation from process to outcome, from output things that you produce to why you produce them, Everybody understands the outcome. If you're localizing an app because you want twice as many people to be able to use it, the work that you're doing is enabling twice as many people to use the app. Whether it takes translation or it takes redesign, or it takes a million other things. Those are details, and they are different from one operation, one product, one service, one project to another. But the thing that is unique is that we're trying to solve a problem. Well, let's talk about the problem. Let's name the problem in a way that people understand it, and let's focus on outcome. And then everybody understands it's global experiences as two words. We just try to be as simple as possible. There is no perfect combination. We found it's not that this is the panacea, that this is going to Solve all of our problem. But if you go and talk to your significant other right now and you say, hey, I met a guy that works on Global experiences, the answer that your significant other will give, I assure you, will be a lot more interesting than if you ask the question and you say, this guy works in localization. I don't know what they will say, but it will be a lot more fun and probably creative and interesting than what you will get out of localization. So why do it? [00:10:31] Speaker A: Yeah, that's an incredible thought exercise because it does point in the direction of something that in a lot of our conversations, we get back to, which is this monotonous, very technical process of bringing in a message from one language to another. But it lacks that layer of what experience means, if you could, because, Jose, localization is a very loaded term. It's conceptually, it has so many things, and I was trained to understand, you know, where it came from, that you can write it with an l and then the 10 and the N and like all the. What you said, right. The jargon. And then we get really boxed into these frames. That doesn't even allow us to think outside of it. Help us make some sense of Global Experiences. And I know you've said a few things about that, but what does it, or how do you define it? What's the scope? What's inside of the team that works on Global Experiences? What sits outside? How does it work? [00:11:39] Speaker B: Maybe I say something about what I understood always localization to be and why, trying to move away from that. Right. You say localization, how it came to be. It came to be at a time where there was only translation, and it meant more than translation. And it meant the language alone will not work when you take a product to another country. So, you know, I work in finance, so the easiest example is you need to translate software to use it in a different country, but also adapt to the decimal system or the thousand comma or period in a different country. So that's not only language, that is measures of unit, things like that. That is where it came from. Hard to explain, but it makes sense once that someone takes the time. But Global Experiences is trying to be more about. Maybe none of those things that made sense for localization are necessary to be successful in another region with another audience. So Global Experiences could be. If our support agents in Indonesia don't speak Indonesian, what can we do to make them interact better with customers or better with partners? Well, we could translate the product. Right? That is one avenue that would be part of traditional localization but. And we might want to also provide documentation so they understand how to use it. But we might also just not do any of those and just provide them with training materials on how to use the product in English, but with job aids that are localized. A guide could be in Indonesian, but the software could remain in English. And you start to look at like wait, wait, wait, but that's not how it should be. And Global Experiences is trying to like, question why I don't have perhaps money or resources to translate my product into Indonesian. It's not big enough of a market for me. I don't have a good business reason to do it. But I still have users over there. So can we focus on the experience of those users and see what is the best outcome we can get for them? So maybe, yes, maybe I'm creating something that is far from ideal, but it will help them. Maybe it's a machine translation that enables them. Maybe it's over the phone interpreting. Maybe those agents, the most important thing is not the use of the product. Maybe they can talk about two people kind of speak in Indonesian about a product that is in English. And we're still creating the best support experience for people in Indonesia because they ask someone else in Indonesian about the product. So trying to disassociate language from actually creating a successful experience and looking at every single case differently, it is a very different type of approach because we're using localization. We're like very dogmatic. This is how it should be. You should be doing this language and do it to the ultimate consequences. You localize a product and you do the product, the help, the documentation, the job aids, the. You name it. But what if some of those are not in the cards? We had a similar conversation with machine translation versus nothing. What makes for a better user experience to my user in Indonesia that I give them far less than ideal Indonesian machine translated content that they will struggle to understand or that I will, I give them English that they will not understand. So all of this menu of options under the umbrella of Global Experiences just multiplies. We look at how we make the experience better and what tools and what resources and what money and what time we have to actually execute on them. And then you go for highest priority or low hanging fruit with the highest impact and then you pursue that. You never call it done. It's never going to be perfect. We're never going to say, oh, we don't need to say we are localized into Indonesia. We just say we have enhanced experience for users over there. And then the next quarter or the next half year, the next year we'll look at what else is needed to continue to improve the user experience. But maybe there is no point and maybe we invest less instead of more. All of this just makes people in localization in general, when I talk to people, cringe a little bit and it's not as easy as I make it sound. But the opposite, the dogmatic approach of let's do everything under the sun, that wasn't working. I don't think that it works for most people, quite honestly. Not sure if I answered your question or not. It just made things a lot more complicated. [00:15:56] Speaker A: I think you did, and it's a very wide topic. I think something that you mentioned really got my attention, which is this idea that your team is looking at everything differently and in a way you're de dogmatizing the entire process. Could you tell us a little bit about what changed operationally as you're changing all these concepts and you are learning things? What changed in the operations of the team and how did your metrics, your North Star metrics, change in this process that we're talking about? [00:16:27] Speaker B: So perhaps the biggest change has been in we would usually ask a whole department to give us metrics on success. So we used to beg people for give me something to justify my roi. And we would do that with a whole department. So if I'm talking to the education services group, I might just ask them is tell me how the content that we produce for you is performing. Now, the conversation is framed different from the beginning. We have the conversation at the very beginning, as we should have always done, and we talk to the team and we say, okay, so this is the content that we're going to do. How will we measure that it is successful? And then we agree on that, and then we set a timeline. We say, we will complete this work by this time and by this time you're going to give us this type of metric so that we can make a decision to continue localizing such content. For instance, doubling down if it's performing well, or stop it if it's not performing at all. That at the department level is a much harder conversation than if you go to the individual or the region level. Because reality is, within a given department, I might be talking to another director or a vp and their alignment isn't necessarily perfect with their team. So I might talk to a VP who doesn't see that as a priority, doesn't have the time, or doesn't understand how to support us, and they will not be Necessarily the best partner. But I can go to a specific region within that team, one regional team in that department that really is trying to fix the experience in Japan and I can have a conversation for Japan only and then maybe what we'll do is try this experience. Instead of like in all the languages that we support or in all our top priority markets, it becomes a region specific conversation and that can become a pilot. If we can prove the point doing that for one single region, who really wants it, who maybe the region needs it, or someone in there is a champion who wants to see this through. That is a great ally for us to test if the global experience will work and then see if it needs to be grown into other regions or if it can inspire other departments. So in many ways is going from that talking to leadership and selling your global strategy, that still happens. That is something that you need to do. But there is also this opportunity to just find what areas of the company are low hanging fruit for us to improve on the user experience. And we only need someone to really want to go that way to prove a point or to test a point and see if the rest of the company should be inspired. It's like running experiments all the time. I use the word experiment pilot and experiment all the time and I find that it's a great conversation opener. I can talk to someone who is like really busy, but I can tell them, hey, why don't we try this in one language. Let's pick the one that is like the most painful right now. You know, Japan is super complex. Japan help us test a lot of scenarios. If we can make it work for Japan, then it's safe to assume we'll be able to reproduce it for other regions that have like different standards or different barriers with, with language. Okay, well we run it only in Japanese. Traditionally we would have just said this needs to be into all of our top tier one languages. And then I need alignment from a bunch of people and then I need budget for a lot of things and the return is never guaranteed. That is, that is also something that I find people have a struggle to admit. The return on anything that you produce in English, on, in any other language is never warranted. Even when you have the best intentions, even when it feels right. I love fighting with my team about what feels right. It's like, yeah, what feels right doesn't sell more, doesn't keep us from, you know, doesn't keep us in business. So. But if we can show metrics, if we can show progress, if we can move the needle somewhere that is really interesting. So I would rather do 100 pilots than two full width initiatives across the company that might never produce anything of value. And I'm taking everything to extremes, right? There is a lot of like safe space in the, in the middle. But that's, that's the principle and people seem to relate to that. And you get champions and you get people who want to be successful with you, people who also believe in what you're doing. And you in a way can dodge a lot of like the naysayers, the people that don't believe in the value of what we're doing, et cetera, et cetera. So it's also, it's also a survival or a thriving technique. [00:21:00] Speaker A: And of course those that are open to that conversation are the ones that now thrive in that, in that new ecosystem. There's an ecosystem that it's more creative, it's innovative, where you need to propose and dare to do certain things. It, it seems also that it is part of the current stage of the conversation, even with your clients as well. How have the conversation changed for those, when they hear global experience and you connect with the UX teams, what do they expect? Being on the receiving end of global experience, it's like, okay, great. I assume also that cynicism of like what it's like, okay, the result, we're talking about a similar result. But what do they expect at the end of the day from you? Now? [00:21:48] Speaker B: I think that if I'm being candid, it's. They expect great user experience. That is what people translate it into. And this is very important is that we are friends, good friends with the user experience team and that we work closely because in some cases there is even like confusion, right? You could be, you're really enabling user experience and that's what people want. But you need to, you know, you cannot fix all the problems by yourself. So you always need. There is a team who, taking English as an example, there's always a team that you need to be holding hands with because without them we can't do anything. Any element that we have has a foundation that was developed, most likely in our case in English. And we need to go holding hands and talk to customers and talk to internal partners and you say, hey, we understand really well what we're doing and this is how we're going to multiply that experience. That is actually something that we use, it's a term that we use internally to explain it to people as well, is we're trying to take a great experience and multiply it. So we are in a way, the experience or the cultural multiplier, if you will. And I don't know, people just get excited about the fact that they could get something because at the end of the day, everybody identifies at least with one culture strongly. And hearing that someone is trying to do something for you in particular for your culture, for your nationality, for whatever it is or whatever identity you have, it's just, it gets people really engaged, but they don't know what to expect, to be honest. So it's. And, and, and you can't avoid not saying the words, translating or, or localizing. You just never lead with those, those words are not disappearing from the vocabulary. I'm just like cutting it off from our messaging to the world. You still need it internally. I still need to talk to suppliers and partners and, and, and everything, but not to the larger, to the, to the, to the larger world outside of the organization. [00:23:36] Speaker A: Jose, as, as we were talking about initially, because you've worn and the ones that you wear right now, your voice for the community is important and we've heard voices that now have evolved significantly in the past year. The whole conversation of how technology plays a role within the industry for yourself. Where does the ecosystem, the community and talent go from here? If you are. And we are here talking to the ecosystem, we are here talking to the talent, where does it go from here? And I'm also thinking, of course, which is, my next question is, okay, what talent are you going to be hiring for? The ecosystem needs to change and it's changing. Talent and how they approach. The conversation needs to change and it's changing. And the way you hired and the talents that you hire for need to change and are changing. What can you tell us about that conversation? [00:24:32] Speaker B: So one of like the three core attributes or the three pillars of moving into global experiences is technology. Right? That is in every conversation, if we're talking to a stakeholder within the, within the company, we really are asking for them to work with us so that we can support users, prospects, whatever it is. And one of the things that scares people away from having to work with you is that there is a level of complexity. So technology and complexity are two things that we bring into the equation and, and that will dictate who we hire in the future. I do not, I think that we're going to move towards, like, having people who are like, really good at what they do and really specialize on something. Because right now, very quickly, I need to go to. Global experiences means cracking the larger picture into smaller Fracturing it into smaller pieces and using technology to try something experiment pilot very quickly. So for instance, AI is something that I'm assuming that everyone on my team, current and future, will be super, not only familiar but involved with. Because when you connect with someone about a given experience, you need to prove success fast. That might mean doing things that look dirty and to some even unethical right now like, oh, let's just do translation through AI. Oh, but someone will review it. No, no, no, not necessarily, not for the pilot. We're trying to move from 0 to 20, we're not trying to move from 0 to 80 or to 100. We just want that. So for this I need someone who is very open minded, familiar with technology and can go and move at the speed that everything is changing. So we will be looking for. I can tell you about the roles. I think that the future is in different flavors of program management. You will have specialists on AI for sure, but I think that the bulk of it will be people who have accumulated a lot of experience in solving problems using AI, not with a particular technology, not with a particular building framework, not with a particular tool. But it will be more that I am highly specialized in sovereign solving problems with AI and then we can continue to train them towards being a strategic understanding what the global experiences framework is about how to fail fast. That's a very Silicon Valley thing to say, but it's. But fail fast is super real right now. People are not aware of how much more powerful it is within your company to say, we tried these four things. This one works to some degree. These three were garbage. But being able to say, I've tried four things related to AI and I found one that is at least workable and measure how much savings, efficiency, productivity that generates. That is so much better than just say, oh, we don't know, oh no, nothing works. It's like, no, find something that works so that you can talk about it and that will give you extra credibility with the things that they don't work. So as you can see, this is not so much about like the technical chops. I think that the technical chops, I see more of them being outsourced. That is where I see when you think like the full ecosystem, no company, all of the companies that I know are, unless they're like AI specific, but they are contracting the workforce, it is reducing because you don't need so many people to do the easier stuff. And a lot of it is bullshit. A lot of it is, you know, AI isn't doing your job as well as you were. But that's gonna happen at least for a while where people just think it should and it's trendy to do it. It reminds me of like a few years back when we were in tech and it became trendy to just fire everyone at the end of the year just for. Because the alignments were not okay. It's like, no, that's just a trend. It's become trendy and acceptable to lay people off at the end of the year because you are pivoting your business. Well, this is the. We're like shedding people because AI can do more for us. I think that there will be some course correction, but I think that the reality is that companies like mine will not be able to hire in big numbers and smaller medium sized providers will have the greatest opportunity because you can be that outside arm of my organization where it's a lot easier to have someone highly educated, high performing, that I just have a contract with than to have all of those as headcount and organizational overhead. So because it's very easy to become an AI expert, I think that we will be. Whoever we hire will need to be really good at problem solving, talking to different people and handling that complexity. And then we're going to be looking more into the smaller and small and medium providers to be that extra talent that we need. And I think that that's one of the pivots that so many LSPs that are super afraid right now will be moving into. The fact that you can now hire. You can hire an engineer and do a million things that I couldn't do because I won't be able to hire an engineer in my company. But you can. And you can hire them in a location that is like, makes sense to you for your operations, for your cost, for your everything. And you can build things a lot faster than I can within the organization. While the future is you stop. You're a translation company now. You can turn into a different type of service company. You could be. We have one example at Koopa where we had a small boutique firm that we have been working on localization for the longest time. And then out of a casual conversation we said, well, I wish that we could build some small language model that can do this and that. And we were just having, you know, just thinking out loud and then this LSP says, well, we can give that a try. And that LSP goes and hires someone part time. Listen to your, to your ideas. We plan something together and all of a sudden they're building it for you. And that happens in just a very few months. You have multiple iterations. Something happened. That company now has a super valuable service. They have repositioned themselves in the ecosystem and the threat of AI replacing us all entirely, it is smaller for them. So why are we not doing a lot more than that since I won't be able to hire my full team, but other people can? It's just a very different mindset. So we're asking, we're asking people to be pioneers and leaders in this change, which is. It's not easy, but there's a lot of opportunity. [00:31:08] Speaker A: I see a lot of opportunity as well, Jose, and it's really refreshing to also listen to your perspective. We could talk for hours, I have to say, and we have so many topics to cover, but I think for today we've gotten so much value from you. Jose, thank you so much. Are there any message, any final thoughts that you have that you consider are relevant for our community to listen to at this stage? [00:31:31] Speaker B: I guess that the big message is localization isn't helping you, isn't helping you talk to clients or stakeholders. So just look at yourself in the mirror, say localization three times and see if some kind of like, spirit appears that tells you that you should be doing something about it. Now, localization is letting you down as a term and you need to speak the business of your business partners, whether it's customers or. Or stakeholders. And for this community in particular, I just want to say the talent that we need is solving problems. Solving problems right now requires knowledge of AI and nimbleness. So if you. I think, I think that people need to get very serious about training and bringing people in. It's, it's. There's never been a better time to bring interns from universities to actually. Yeah, no, to help you set a foundation, because they come, for instance, with a lot of energy and not a lot of experience, but a lot of energy and ingenuity. And you can benefit from that if you stick to the old models. I used to say this too, about machine translation. I don't see you leaving this space or being in a comfortable position in the future. I think that it's imperative that you make a move right now. [00:32:45] Speaker A: Wonderful, Jose. Thank you so much. I'm sure many in the industry and also the talent that's incoming, that is, considering this conversation, is going to really think into it. And for all of us is a conversation to have for those that are listening. Thank you for being part of Lang talent. Huge thanks once again to Jose Palomares. For unpacking the shift from localization to global experiences and how organizational design, artificial intelligence, and cross functional alignment turn language work into measurable growth. Catch new episodes of Lang Talent on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube. Subscribe rate and leave a review so others can find the show. I'm Eddie Arrieta, once again CEO here at Multilingual Media. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time. Goodbye. Ciao, Jose. [00:33:33] Speaker B: Ciao, ciao.