Iti Sahai is the Leader of Localization & Globalization at Procore Technologies. Procore is a global B2B software platform that organizes all collaborators from vendors, company owners and planners within the construction industry. Procore enhances the experiences of all members involved in projects and provides a way for folks to do their best work through project management.
Iti’s career began in an exciting place one would not necessarily equate with language services: Bollywood. Eventually her artistic path transitioned from the film industry into storytelling for businesses via localization. For Iti, the ability to tell the story of a company, technology or tool to a brand new culture through language satisfies her desire to creatively communicate.
Iti and her work continues to evolve as she and her team contextualize content for various locales, face and overcome obstacles through adapting workflows across countries and create cohesion within the very nuanced and detailed construction industry.
Listen to Iti’s compelling stances of ROI in localization, learn how she strives to bring localization to the forefront of projects, and hear about her personal challenges and successes at Procore.
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What you’ll learn on this episode:
- How Iti’s path led her from Bollywood to localization
- The power of storytelling in localization
- What Procore specializes in and how the construction industry relies on localization
- Contextualizing content for different locales
- How Iti aims to bring localization to the forefront of each project and why
- Iti’s philosophy on the idea of ROI in localization
Jump right in:
[01:52] Iti’s background and experience growing up in India.
[03:52] The path from India to America and from filmmaking to localization.
[04:35] Storytelling through localization.
[08:10] About Procore and Iti’s role there.
[10:39] Contextualizing content for various locales.
[13:42] Workflow adaptabilities across countries and the importance of adding value.
[14:43] Content, branding, and customer experience expectations.
[15:50] Challenges in managing translation.
[19:25] What Iti learned from working at an LSP.
[21:35] Milestone projects she has been a part of at Procore and their results.
[23:37] Bringing localization to the fore of projects.
[27:53] Showing the strategic value of localization to those that don’t see it’s importance.
[32:25] Does ROI for translation matter?
[35:26] Demonstrating ROI.
[37:11] The importance of viewing localization as a multifaceted approach.
[41:20] Tracking efficacy through user experience.
Keep up to date with Iti and Procore:
Full Transcript that almost certainly has typos (forgive us!)
Announcer: You're listening to The Loc Show presented by Smartling.
Adrian Cohn: Hello, and welcome back to The Loc Show. I'm your host, Adrian Cohn with Smartling. It is so good to see you again. Thank you, thank you, thank you for listening. This podcast continues to be a dream to produce because I have the great pleasure of chatting with some really amazing people every week, and this week is no disappointment. [Iti Sahai 00:00:44] is responsible for localization at Procore, a B2B software company that enables the construction industry to manage building projects around the world. What I absolutely love about [Ati] is that she is hungry to learn and give back. Let's dive into the episode. Ati, welcome to The Loc Show. It's so great to have you here.
Iti Sahai: Thank you for having me. I'm super excited.
Adrian Cohn: It's so much fun talking with people who I've met before in webinars and other events, and you've always been so engaged in our various events at Smartling that I'm so excited to soak up your knowledge and to learn all about your experience in localization today.
Iti Sahai: Me too. I hope I have something of value to say. So yeah, I'm super excited to have this conversation with you.
Adrian Cohn: I have no doubt that you have much wisdom to share. Tell us a little bit about yourself. What's your background?
Iti Sahai: I grew up in India, and when I was in college and I was trying to decide what do I want to pursue in terms of a career, the obvious option for me was not engineering. So it was the next best thing, which was Bollywood, because obviously, why not, right? So yeah, my first foray into the professional world was in Bollywood. I had this amazing opportunity to work for one of the most renowned film makers in India, and yeah, that just led me into wanting to learn more about the craft, and I moved to The States many, many years ago to pursue my masters in film. Then, of course, the next step was setting sail to LA. So I transitioned into working for film in LA, working for a film distribution studio. Along the way, I got to meet some incredible people and just had an amazing time.
Adrian Cohn: I love the film industry. In fact, when I was younger, I spent a fair amount of time in the film industry. I worked for a production house in New York called Anonymous Content. They're also out in LA. And I made documentary films myself, which was just a very rewarding experience, and I miss it actually. There are elements of storytelling through documentary film that I don't do in B2B marketing, although I am able to use those skills and the art of storytelling in my work, which is rewarding. But that's an unlikely path to get into localization, which is where you are now, but perhaps not an unlikely path to get from India to America.
Iti Sahai: Yeah. I mean, school and education is something that my family, my father, we value quite a bit. So it was a given that if I'm to pursue further studies, it has to be a right fit for me in terms of the school that I want to attend and the program that I want to take. So yeah, the transition was obvious. But funny you say that documentaries were a great way of storytelling for you. I like to think of myself as a storyteller at heart, right, because I'm a filmmaker at heart. I love telling stories. But now that I've transitioned into localization, localization, I believe, allows me to tell the story of a business, of technology, or a tool to a new culture and to a new country through the means of language, but it still satisfies the creative within me, who is a storyteller.
Adrian Cohn: That's profound. That's so cool. We have another podcast called The Move The World With Words podcast, and we only feature translators on this podcast. Check it out. It's on Apple Podcast, Spotify, wherever you listen. And what I genuinely love about interviewing translators is that they share the same sentiment that you just did, which is translation and words have meaning, and you're really able to convey a story through language. So I think that's a really cool experience that you had with your transition from film into localization and how you're still able to relate to the storytelling components of film in the work that you do today.
Iti Sahai: Yeah. Of course, for me, film was... I didn't know it at that time because I was fairly certain that filmmaking and producing was going to be a path for me the rest of my life. However, I didn't realize it at that time that it was just a gateway for me to fall in love with localization and to pursue it as a career path.
Iti Sahai: Throughout even my growing up experience, I consumed a lot of Western content that came into India, but it was often dubbed or subtitled. So I've had debates with numerous friends who would call a certain character a certain name or call a certain show a certain name, but it was always localized for the Indian audience. So it was often transcreated. Not the best, but they did what they could many, many years ago, right, given the circumstance and the technology available at that time. So I was always familiar with that aspect of content being adapted to a region outside of English or whatever was essentially being developed or created.
Iti Sahai: Even my first foray into film was as a college student, I had the opportunity to meet with several executive producers and filmmakers who were either trying to produce a film, which was an international film, in India or an Indian film overseas. So I was always involved in the international component of it and also the elements of transcreation and adaption that would factor in for the content itself. But language has always been a part of my journey. It's just that I didn't realize it then.
Iti Sahai: I like to believe that there is this universal intelligence that surrounds us, which not just lives in the living things but also it's around and it onlooks us, and sometimes it guides us to our path. Even though we might not see it from the get-go, it leads us to that path. For me, it happened in a very beautiful circumstance and how it all transpired, but I'm glad that I'm on the path that I'm on right now.
Adrian Cohn: We'll get to some of the other stepping stones that got you to where you are now in a little bit, but let's discover a little bit more about where you are now. You're at Procore Technologies. Tell us about your role there. Tell us about the company.
Iti Sahai: Procore is a construction software, so it's a B2B SaaS platform, and essentially what Procore is aiming to do is to improve the lives of everyone in construction by connecting them on a global platform. So blue-collar tech is one of the lead adopters of technology, however it's fairly up-and-coming and that's something to watch out for in the next 15 years. And I'm super excited about the work that we're doing at Procore. It's a product that's built for the people, in collaboration with the construction industry folks, and enhancing their everyday experience and taking it away from the more manual tasks, but giving them a way to connect with one another and be on top of things.
Iti Sahai: And so my role, essentially, is taking care of R&D localization. So essentially, UX product and engineering, so establishing their best practices and how I can really create enablement for each of those groups to do their best work and how we can build Procore in a way that it's global by design. And also that we are not on your downstream practical effect is that we're not incurring tech debt as we are scaling. So we are very conscientious of the fact that construction exists everywhere. Right? And, and it's something which we've noticed in the recent events. It's something that hasn't really been affected as much, despite the world coming to a standstill, because it's an essential requirement to our existence, to us building communities, and living in, and experiencing in those structures. Right? So it's fundamental to our existence in the modern world and in the world today, no matter wherever you are. So my role essentially focuses on empowering the teams within R and D and then collaborating with my CS and marketing counterparts as well, so that we can build Procore which is global by design.
Adrian Cohn: Wow, that's fascinating. I mean, that's a lot of different types of content, different teams that you have to work with to manage translation with Procore. How many languages are you supporting?
Iti Sahai: So we are [inaudible] in five locales, and I say locales and not languages because we have three English variants, and two languages that are French-Canadian and Spanish for LATAM, but with construction being such a unique industry... And we do have outliers where we have Thai and other languages available, but those are not something we offer at a general availability, and there are reasons for that. Why? Because our product is something which is very unique, not just to the US, but also to construction.
Iti Sahai: So the language is one component to it, of localizing, that we have to be aware of. However, the other component is adapting the product itself to the regional requirements, and so regionalizing the product so it has that acceptance and it is allowing the user in the region that they experience the product or interact with it, in a near native way, and it doesn't seem like it's a US based product that they're being pushed on. Because the reality is, construction is so complex that a lot of the terms, which could be in English, but they are used in a different way, and there is a different meaning associated with it. So it was very interesting for me to sort of have the Aha moment, that even for English, we can have ones for locales.
Iti Sahai: And a simple example of that is, what I grew up calling brinjal in India, in Europe it's called aubergine, and in the US we refer to it as eggplant. Guess what? It's the same exact English. It's English, but the variants of it could really differ, right, in the region that we're referring to the object with. So that was a very long winded answer to your question of how many languages do we offer.
Adrian Cohn: But you reveal so much about what you're doing and it's important because how many of us are actually thinking about English as a locale? Oftentimes businesses may overlook that. So it's a good reminder. It's a healthy reminder, especially to those businesses listening, those people listening, who are newer to localization, it's more than translation. It's adapting the message for the market that you are targeting. It could be adapting it with images. It could be adapting it with different word choices. It could be not translating content. There are a lot of ways that you can localize an experience and there are a lot of things that come to mind right away with construction. Unit of measure, I mean, that's a basic one but, "Hey, you can't get that wrong from region to region." Yeah.
Iti Sahai: [inaudible] That's so accurate, but simple things. And also the business practices, or workflows in different countries are very distinct. So what quality and safety product would be expected to do in the ANZ region, it'd be very different from the expectations, which are mandated as part of the business practice to US. So the product needs to adapt and be able to drive that value for the customer. And I like to believe that localization doesn't essentially mean that you're delivering quantity. It doesn't. I can translate and localize a hundred unique assets for my user, however they don't deliver the same value as ten core assets would. So it's a matter of identifying what value you are delivering overall to the customer, and seeing it through.
Adrian Cohn: Tell me a little bit about your content. What's it like? What's your brand like?
Iti Sahai: Our content is... It's interesting you asked that, because there are numerous personas, right, that interact with our platform. And each persona has a certain expectation when they interact with the platform. If it's an owner, somebody who owns a construction project, which is worth multimillion dollars, they have a certain expectation. Right? So the tone for them would be different than a general contractor or someone else actually working in the field. So it varies. However, for now we have tried to keep it at a very standard baseline where there is no... There is parity. I would say that there is parity in the experience, and the tone, and the voice of the content; but in terms of assets, I mean we do have the product, which is localized, and aside from that, the marketing collateral, the training documents, training videos, all sorts of stuff.
Adrian Cohn: What are some of the challenges that you're facing in managing localization for all of these different personas and all of these different types of content that you're translating. Because it's not just marketing content. It's not just product content. There's even more to it than that, right?
Iti Sahai: Yeah. I would say the one big challenge is that usually in the past, when I've worked with vendors and identifying the linguists and the experts. Typically, if it is let's say a collateral or a client that deals in med devices or life sciences or industrial automation, someone on the backend, whoever the linguist is, I have worked with my vendor to identify the linguist or the LSP that on the backend, that works on that content to actually know the subject, right? They're either researchers or they are working practitioners of the craft. So they exactly know what they are. They know the context of the content. And it's not just something that anyone who speaks a language can translate or can [inaudible 00:17:02], because there is a lot of nuance and complexity that goes into it.
Iti Sahai: So, the one challenge I would say is identifying the resources that have construction background or construction know how, to localize our content, so that they can accurately adapt it for their region. Because, even though there are resources that we have identified over time and I'm constantly in the process of identifying more, but typically someone who has experience, who's been an architect or doesn't really transition into working as a linguist. So, that's not the career path you'd notice in ... So yeah, I would say that is a big challenge is finding the resources that are familiar with construction.
Adrian Cohn: So, once you find, let's say you're trying to translate the product into French for Canada, which you're doing. You go off to find some translators to do the work. What's your vetting process? What happens when you speak to a translator to make sure they do have that domain expertise in addition to the linguistic knowledge and knowhow?
Iti Sahai: The initial expectation I would say is of course going through the L QAs and giving them sample texts and content. But, I feel a lot of it also has to do with the fact that you need to set up your linguistic resources for success. So, establishing style guides and glossaries for those regions is paramount. And that we do internally with our product experts, or how we like to call them the strategic product consultants. And with different products, they're named differently. But, they're essentially the core experts within a region for that product. And partnering up with them quite early on in the process when we have the key terms identified, to include them in the glossary, so that there is a term parody across the product and across the experience than the user would have even interacting with the marketing collateral or a training video. That there is that consistency across the board.
Adrian Cohn: Wow. And part of your path to Procore, from Bollywood to Procore, maybe that'll be the title of this episode. Kind of like that. You worked at a language services provider. You worked for a company that did translation. How did that inform how you manage localization today? What'd you learn?
Iti Sahai: Wow. Working for an LSB was such an incredible experience. And it was actually quite a strategic move on my part that I had always been a part of localization process or the workflow from the buyer perspective. So I really wanted that opportunity to work and know the processes and the stakeholders involved at an LSB, and how things are actually done in the trenches, right? If a client gives you a 24 hour turnaround from English to Kazakh, how do you make it happen, given the time zones and all the things that can possibly go wrong? So it was challenging. It was very exciting. But, it was such a huge learning experience because what it allowed me to build is the empathy towards my linguists and towards my project managers on the LSP side. And, towards the numerous stakeholders that are involved in seeing the project from inception to delivery. So, it was such a learning and incredible process to be a part of an LSB.
Adrian Cohn: How long were you there for?
Iti Sahai: I was there, I believe a little short of three years.
Adrian Cohn: So you saw some stuff. I mean, you were there for long enough to really get your feet wet.
Iti Sahai: Oh, absolutely. I was managing the largest performing industrial automation clients. So, it was definitely quite a learning experience. But aside from that, I had touch points with all sorts of content across my table. Be it legal, be it life sciences, be it marketing collateral, be it just about everything.
Adrian Cohn: So when you get to Procore, now you're at Procore and you have a pretty wide scope of what you need to manage. What have been some of the milestone projects that you've worked on and what was the result of these projects?
Iti Sahai: Yeah. So when I started at Procore, I actually had a squad of engineers, which I still do, who work with me. And at that time I didn't have product managers that were assigned to international. So, one of the initiatives that my team and I worked on was to create an experience. It was a prototype feature enhancement that we worked on to develop something that the apps teams could replicate within their tools as well. And all that this tool allowed to do was to engage a multilingual user in how they were able to input their own translations into the product and see that reflected across the reporting and across their experience of the product.
Iti Sahai: So, as a prototype it was very successful and was very well received with the customers. When I was on customer calls and even interacting with international leadership, they were very excited about it. However, the effort to really identify within apps as to where that would be feasible or to even implement, is a different challenge. But, that is something that I'm extremely proud of, is to deliver that value to the multilingual users. And most recently I launched a UX enablement program for localization, which I'm so excited about. It is essentially to enable the UX group, when they are in the discovery and the design phase, to adapt their design and see that if they're able to see it through pseudo localization or through machine translation in the target languages, so that they can adapt it to a future state of the product.
Adrian Cohn: So you're talking about bringing the translation process way forward in the product development process, yeah?
Iti Sahai: Oh, absolutely. Normally what you would see in the industry is localization as an afterthought. However, I'm of the opinion that it needs to go the top of the funnel. It needs to be one of the first things you think about. The moment you have an idea of like, "Hey, there's a great tool we should build." The next question should be, "All right. Well, where is this tool going to be released?" Are we going to release it in regions outside of North America, essentially English US locale. If the answer was yes, then you need to start thinking of localizing your entire go-to market and being able to include localization and the different elements and aspects of your go-to market strategy.
Adrian Cohn: So what is this course, let's call it, entail? What have you documented to help educate your colleagues on what the process is for pulling localization to be earlier forward in the development process?
Iti Sahai: I would recommend if you are in a product org and the organization has established a process, that is, the company wide expectation for product, be it discovery, be it design, builds, or deploy, whatever it is. If there is a process already identified for you, that's a great starting point because all you can do then is go into that document and identify the opportunity where localization should be considered. Be it even in the release strategy you need to identify, "Hey, do we need a rollout strategy behind a launch [inaudible] to roll out 10% per region, just so we can catch any bugs and make sure that it's a seamless experience and things don't break," because in a CDCI environment, things do tend to break. So just so you know, you are factoring in that release strategy and localization in the process.
Iti Sahai: If the organization has that document, I would say, definitely find the person who owns it and have conversations. But at the same time, I like to see myself as an entrepreneur within the organization. There's just one of me in all of Procore, which is unique and challenging at the same time, because I do have folks who are interested and intrigued by international. So they would want to have that conversation and they'll initiate it. But then there are folks who, the product doesn't have an international viability. They don't see that opportunity. So they just perceive international as something that's just going to slow them down. So they don't even want to hear me, or see me or know of me ever. But I, as I said, see myself as an entrepreneur, that I am championing this cause.
Iti Sahai: So if it takes for me to meet with every squad to build a relationship with every product manager and push myself through these conversations and create a road show that I can educate people and evangelize localization across the [inaudible 00:26:49], really show them through data in terms of what the TAM is, what is the total accessible market outside of the US and what is that opportunity look like and are we salivating for it or not? And how much do we want it and what will it take for us to get there? So really being informed as well about the total market opportunity helps.
Adrian Cohn: So you've got a lot of different angles that you consider when you think about managing localization. You're thinking, "What is the business impact?" And that's one lever you pull to help to demonstrate to people why localization should be more deeply integrated into the process. The other lever you're pulling is, "Okay, let's look at that process and let's figure out how do we optimize it to be most efficient for localizing content on an ongoing basis." And your recommendation there is to put it at the very beginning of the development process.
Adrian Cohn: What else are you saying to folks who don't want to talk to you, because your translation and translation is slow and I don't want to think about it. I know that you're not alone. That's a sentiment that we hear and see across the industry at every conference that we attend from people who are coming to SmartLink, sometimes it's SmartLink customers who have that experience as well. What else are you doing to, I mean, it's great that you're a hustler and you're proactively reaching out to these people, but what else is part of your arsenal to show and demonstrate the strategic value of bringing localization into the fold?
Iti Sahai: So, one of the recent conversations I had with a senior leader regarding international, and it was something along the lines of the English locales and the English [inaudible] that you and I have previously discussed and really backing it up with some very illustrative examples that once it's in front of you and black and white, there is nothing that can refute that or deny that claim because that difference exists. And mostly a leader who is willing to learn and who is willing to take the ownership to educate themselves, we'll invite you to the conversations and we'll be more than welcoming to what do you have to contribute and say, however, that's not always the case. So for those situations, what I recently did was, I took a online program for product management certification at Cornell, which was a great experience.
Iti Sahai: And not to say that people need to go and study, but for me, it worked because I'm aligned with product and I'm interacting with product X and product managers tend to have a different way of thinking about the product itself. Their core job is to break, really nitpick and shred the problem down so that they can build it up better and understanding and understanding that is so critical to your success in R&D, in the product org and to really create those champions because your biggest advocate is going to be a convert. Someone you have converted to understanding localization and the value and the impact it can have. So I studied product because, firstly, I needed to educate myself to come in as an informed ally and consultant and [inaudible] to these conversations. Right? And to even understand how the product is built and what goes into that whole process.
Iti Sahai: And additionally, the other thing is, once you've done all of that, you are engaged in those conversations. It has now allowed me to think differently from a strict product perspective and to make the argument, or make the case as to what is best for the product itself and what the limitations could perhaps be. The other thing that I like to often lead with in conversations, essentially with the revenue org, that localization is not going to generate you revenue. That's just a fact. Localizing a product, or a collateral or an asset is not going to generate revenue. So what it will do, however, is to unlock the potential for that revenue in the target market. Without localizing the product, you can't win the market. So even though translating something it's not going to win, but having the right sort of localization for your product and having the right localization strategy and the product localization strategy in place will allow you to win that market.
Iti Sahai: And usually folks are very open to that conversation I mean that argument, and just sort of a light bulb goes off that, that's right. There are numerous case studies. I mean, if you look over the internet, there are numerous case studies of how products have tried to penetrate Japan or regions where it's been a total bust because they didn't localize the product well enough, and they didn't have localization strategy in place, which didn't speak to the user that they were trying to delight in the process.
Adrian Cohn: Does ROI, for translation, matter?
Iti Sahai: Yes and no. It depends on who you're talking to basically. Because if you're talking to someone who just is, and it could be any leader, who is very focused on numbers and crunching numbers, then yes. Showing them data in terms of what the spend was, and as I said, what market we were able to unlock because of the spend, and what sort of revenue projections are there for the next two years, three years. What is the ARR for this specific region, does make a good business case.
Iti Sahai: However, on the localization strategy side, also recognizing how you are successfully setting yourself up for success, basically, by creating glossaries and recycling Tams and engaging with your vendors to partner up with you and to deliver value and cost effectiveness over time. Does of course matter because you don't want to throw money at something that's not generating you enough revenue.
Iti Sahai: So then again, identifying your ideal localization strategy and working back towards the product and then identifying your product localization strategy, which starts at the product and works outwards towards the user journey, towards the user experience. And where these two meet and, which I like to call is the bliss point, right? Which is the right amount of sweet and the right amount of salt, which delights the customer in a way that they converted into a paying customer and a lifelong user, or if he's for the lifecycle. That it is, would definitely of value over time.
Adrian Cohn: So it sounds like ROI matters. It's not as simple as I spend $10 on translation, I get a hundred dollars, 10 times the ROI. It's not that simple. It sounds to me like what you're saying is the ROI comes in to the efficiency of a translation program. We spend a hundred thousand dollars a year on translation, but over time we want to see that value crash because we're recycling translations that are in our translation memory. We're getting more efficient at delivering the service because we have a better glossary and style guide. Is it, is it those milestones or those incremental wins that deliver against a somewhat hard to calculate ROI?
Iti Sahai: Yes, it does. I'm guess it does most definitely. And you know, whenever I speak to a leader, be it these beads or whoever I'm having a conversation with, I usually set the expectation and from the get go very upfront, that localization is going to, you're going to start seeing that ROI downstream eventually in time. It's not going to be that you flip the switch on acquiring a new TMS or a new vendor. And all of a sudden there would be cost savings and better quality and all of that.
Iti Sahai: Because, guess what, all of this takes time. Even how you train your engine to even if you're using a machine translation engine and how you training it, how are you inputting the translations? What sort of feedback are you getting from the region and factoring it in to your translation memory, et cetera. Over time you'll see that, right? And so it's a slow gradual process. And as an organization and especially a localization leader, right, you need to be able to confidently say that. And not feel like you have to make grandiose promises, which you can't deliver on because that's not how the ROI essentially works.
Adrian Cohn: It sounds like your goal is to show your company how to produce a localized user experience as efficiently as possible. And you do that in a lot of different ways, whether it's pulling translation forward, training your linguists to translate the content better. It's a multifaceted approach. Am I catching your drift here correctly?
Iti Sahai: Yes, it is. Because as I said translations localization is not just a one issue fix it all sort of solution. It isn't. It has to be a multi pronged approach. And how soon are you considering a localization and an international launch and your discovery and your design process? What are you doing to even be a globally inclusive, in terms of a product? Are you internationalizing in your code or are you creating tech debt or when you do decide to go international. And how are you, what is your release strategy?
Iti Sahai: What is your roll out strategy and what sort of value are you delivering in the process to the user? Are you really, is it a real user centered approach to your localization efforts, even? So it's a multi pronged approach. I am a strong believer in the fact that if you, once you start to create that empathy for your user and you start tracking down your localization strategy, right, you have to map out the user journey in terms of what is the first collateral that they're seeing. Are they seeing an ad? Did you send them an email? Is that email localized? Whatever that is, right? You're tracking that localization strategy. What strategy, if you like to visualize, if there's a line it's a straight line. On the end of one line is the localization strategy. And at the end of this line is on the other side is the product localization strategy.
Iti Sahai: Now these two are not competing. They are not parallel, but they are complimentary of one another. As you map out the localization strategy, which essentially is tracking the user journey all the way towards the product, which kind of sits in the middle, right? That's where your product sits. So that could be an ad, email, marketing campaign, whatever that is, your website, all the way to the product.
Iti Sahai: And the product localization strategy is working towards the middle to the product, by making your code internationalized, by regionalizing your product, identifying what is the regional needs for you to truly make your product successful? What goes beyond localization, right? That's not something I can do on my own. I need to have a team of engineers. I need the education piece in the org itself so that they recognize it. That the product needs to be successful. And this is what we need to do. And at the top of that funnel since localization, which is really adapting the message of the product, it's not who you translations the message of the content that you are, that lives in the UI for that product. And as you it's two. One of the line localization strategy.
Iti Sahai: The other end of this line is the product localization. Kind of work their way towards, to meet in the middle at the product is when this localization strategy that you've charted out as a localization leader within the organization converts the user to be delighted towards the product. And that's where the product localization will carry them through to being engaged by the product, to really deliver that value over time. So, it's more complex than someone just thinking that, "Hey, if I localize all this collateral and boom, my product is going to be successful, there's going to be product market fit and it's going to be great." No, it isn't. There more than that needs to happen in that ecosystem. And we need to have those champions along the way to make that successful for you.
Adrian Cohn: I love that you're mapping, you're creating a localization consumer journey. And one of the things that I particularly like about that is it sounds like what you could do is track the efficacy of your translations at different touch points. And you'd be able to pinpoint if there's a particular, let's say there's a drop off in a particular spot in the consumer journey, perhaps that would be an indicator for translation quality not being sufficient, or maybe there's a gap. Maybe there's bleed through, things like that. Do you do that type of analysis?
Iti Sahai: Absolutely. I mean, if you track user experience in terms of just the localization or in region for whatever that region is. And in the past it has happened where the user came all the way to a case study that was very engaging for them. However, the CTA, the call to action was localized, but the asset wasn't. So, the asset is in a language they don't understand, and it's a highly technical document. So guess what? It's not going to convert. There's not going to be any further engagement from the user because you really didn't deliver them the values. So really identifying even what those touch points are over time can help you create a more evolved localization program for the entire organization.
Adrian Cohn: Wow. I feel like I've learned a ton just speaking with you for the past, like 40, 45 minutes, and this has been a tremendous conversation. I can't thank you enough for being on the Look show.
Iti Sahai: Oh my gosh. Thank you so much. I hope I made sense because a lot of it is sort of idealistic. But at the same time, this is how I imagined it, right? I, especially when I started at Procore, in any previous roles as well, I'm there to drive impact and drive value for the business, right? So I like to, in the beginning, allowing myself a few days to understand the product, understand the [inaudible] business, et cetera, write out a product brief or a product summary.
Iti Sahai: And my product is localization, right? As a product owner, where do I want to see this in the future state? What would be that incredible experience for my user, right? Sitting in this foreign land, they don't know about the product, they don't know about us. They don't know how we're trying to improve the lives of everyone in construction, right? They don't know us. How can I, by enabling localization, unlock the potential, not just for my company, but for our user. Because as Procore, we are really invested in our customer. And that's something that we sincerely work towards delivering value in the delight through our product.
Iti Sahai: So, I intend to write out, but in the future, what sort of experience I would expect if I'm trying to convert to this product and use this as its main go to for a globally connected network for my users within this industry of construction. But either way, for whatever industry, as a user, if I'm trying to engage with a product, what is this experience should be for me? And so starting from that future state of, let's say, a press release or product brief that you want to write, identify one of the things that they'll just pop up at you. And then realistically factor it into your strategy and tactically handle each of those elements in terms of what can be done, what cannot be done. And invariably, how can you best deliver to your customer and make it a very native, seamless, wonderful, delightful experience for them.
Adrian Cohn: Amazing. These are great lessons, great ideas. If you want to learn more from Ati, she's available. LinkedIn, we can find you on LinkedIn?
Iti Sahai: Absolutely. Reach out. I am on the board of women in localization at Texas, and I'm the mentorship manager there. So, mentorship is something I am always seeking and also I'm leaning in towards. So yeah, I'm happy to support anyone who wants to have a chat, so reach out.
Adrian Cohn: Wow. I just loved that conversation with, Ati. Not only is her path to Procore so interesting to me, but I also admire her sense of sincere curiosity and passion for getting the job done right. This podcast is brought to you by Smartline, a language translation company that moves the world with words. If you liked this podcast, hit the subscribe button. And hey, if you love the show, it would make my day if you left a five star review. Every star counts. Thanks again to Ati. Have a great week and see you next time.
