 Oh, hiya gozaimasu. Watashi wa name wa Christyndes. Adding a lot of, what is she on about faces? Oh wait, you don't understand Japanese. Good. Remember that feeling, because that is how your international customers feel when you don't localize your product. So why am I here today? Right now, I lead the international product team at Twilio. Previously, I've led teams to expand into and across APACT, both in a zero to one startup and mature state enterprise settings. My specialisms are B2B, enterprise SaaS, and regulated industries. Let's warm up. Here are two very similar looking Cadbury dairy milk chocolate bars. Other than the wrappers looking different, what else do you spot? Look, the nutritional outcomes are roughly the same with minor differences here and there. The one on the left is sold in the UK. The one on the right is the Australian version. Now, if you've ever had a conversation with an Aussie, such as I, about Cadbury chocolates, if you haven't done that, please do. They love talking about how their version is just so much better and different. But why? When the functional spec looks nearly identical, let's take another look. Here I highlighted three things. One, product info. Think of this as product marketing, AKA how Cadbury talks about their product. The UK one is made with fresh milk from the British Isles and Ireland. The Aussie one is one made from sustainable cocoa and two proudly made in Tasmania, which is in Australia. What this tells me is what local customers care about. So UK folks like their dairy, like their local dairy, but where it's made matters less. Aussies take pride in locally made products and sustainability is top of mind. Two, let's move on to the sizes. 45 grams in the UK, 75 grams in Australia. Now that's a huge difference. And it's a major element of the product experience. It will certainly take me a lot longer to finish a 75 gram bar than the 45 gram one. So maybe that's where the extra satisfaction comes from. Lastly, let's compare the ingredients. The UK version has lower milk solids and much lower cocoa solids. And they also use vegetable fats while the Aussie one doesn't. Could that be why the Australia one seems smoother and creamier? Maybe Aussies are really onto something here. Now this is just one example of product localization for something as humble but as evergreen as the Cadbury dairy milk. Let's take a step back and ask the fundamental question as we product managers do. Why expand internationally? International expansion is fundamentally about growth. The base high processes is that customers elsewhere have a similar or the same problem to solve and that your value, your product value proposition resonates with them. Most software products are by definition global from a distribution perspective. Many companies after they've found repeatable success in their home country would start tackling new markets simply by selling their original product overseas without any enhancements. Initially, you may see hockey stick growth with minimal GTM motion simply because the base is so low. A GTM first approach is extremely common and can be very cost effective. You definitely want to obtain basic validation of product market fit before investing further into productization. What's crucial at this phase is how not to overlook the valuable GTM customer feedback loop early and frequent and finding clear signals from the noise. Any qualitative or quantitative data that you collect at this point will prove useful in the case building phase for productization. Invest in the infrastructure, tooling and processes that capture these data. For example, does finance report revenue and margins by country? How do you collect country specific feedback? And how might you attribute country to your user product analytics? Don't assume any of these would be available out of the box because they won't. And without these cuts of data, you will have a hard time building a case. You may think, okay, so GTM first, productization next. How long should you wait and what happens if you wait? Things to look out for. In most cases, with some GTM motion, your international business would start growing and fast, probably upwards of 50% year on year for the first few years. The initial phase of growth causes complacency and can be dangerous. You may decide to delay product internationalization investment because of how fast it's growing. But sooner or later, you will start seeing slowing growth rates because your international customers can tell that you're not really local and they can't help but to wonder if your product is really suitable for them and can be trusted. Meanwhile, competition, both local and overseas, would likely have caught up. To be specific, if your home market is, say, in the UK and you're trying to expand into Spain, you will have competition from both the UK and elsewhere trying to do the same. And all of you will likely find a Spanish homegrown competitor very hard to beat. Now, timing is a difficult question to answer without context. My recommendation is to monitor metrics such as slowing growth rates, deteriorating win-loss ratios, conversion and retention. Make sure you have a way to do this in an international slash country cut. And it might also be valuable for you to compare against historicals in your home market. So I've distilled my learnings over the years down to three takeaways with some examples. Here's what we're going to cover next. To be clear, I am by no means the voice of authority on any of this because, one, context really matters. So there's no one-size-fits-all approach. And two, the intent behind these is to help you avoid some common pitfalls. And I will certainly welcome follow-up discussions and feedback. Number one, play it like a team sport. Product management is by definition cross-functional. This is only more true with international expansion, which is a company strategy problem. To set yourself up for success, make sure you have top-down buy-in and sponsorship. Cross-functional alignment is your best friend. So invest in how to work with each other, collaborate and engage. Now, let me take you through a concrete example. Let's begin with some context. Twilio is an enterprise company that headquartered in the US. We're highly distributed with folks all across the globe. On the product level, Twilio has a mature multi-product portfolio. Most people here would be familiar with our communications API, such as SMS and voice. But we also have an application layer that sits on top or adjacent to those API primitives, such as Flex, our programmable contact center, and segment the customer data platform. Various degrees of interdependencies exist within the Twilio product portfolio. As the international product team, there are two key groups of stakeholders that we partner closely with, and the first one is the GTM team, including sales, solutions engineers, support, customer success, CX, who have boots on the ground and serve as our eyes and ears locally at various different customer touchpoints. The second are our core product teams. These are folks who ultimately own the individual vertical product lines. The international product team has inbound and outbound dependencies with them, and we must be able to host trade. The cross-cutting nature of my team means that we must be in lockdowns with these partners all the time. The first step was a stakeholder and role mapping to identify who they are, what they do and own, and importantly, what outcomes motivate them. Then we must ensure these folks actually know who we are, understand our roles. So we created team charters to clarify purpose ownership, and along with a country maturity model, which is a framework to benchmark and articulate our vision of how our product suite may evolve towards a lovable stage to international customers over time. We ran lots of roadshows to get feedback and evangelized up and down the company. The moment I realized the evangelism was working was when the Twilio C suite started using terminology from our country maturity model back at us. That was truly an aha moment for me. Twilio folks respond well to data. So our strategy team built a model that pulled in time, revenue, effort estimates, et cetera, to output a country priority list, which we rallied the whole company around. On a country-by-country basis, my team examined deal-win-loss ratios and reasons, conversion metrics, NPS, CSATs, to stack-rank feature gaps per country. We used numbers to argue and measure, but we didn't forget that we were all humans and loved the story. So we illustrated customer pain points by visually demonstrating international customers less than ideal, sign-up flow, for example. And we collated customer verbatims from the research that we conducted. Together, these were extremely effective. From an operational standpoint, we stood up async Slack channels and regular forums for information exchange and communicating decisions made. Our team also depended heavily on our program managers to manage cross-team dependencies. It took a village, but I can't stress enough the importance of strategic alignment as a success condition for international expansion in a matrix organization. Number two, go deep first, wide later. If you've ever moved to countries, you would appreciate how different it is to visit as a tourist versus living in it, especially if you don't understand the language. The letter gives you an understanding that goes much further beyond the service. This is why your international expansion journey, when you start, you want to go deep rather than wide to de-risk doing too many things, but none of them well. Go after a low-hanging country that is culturally similar and has a reasonable town. For most US and UK products, this means other English-speaking countries, namely UK, US, Canada, Australia, the effort to productize for these countries are low, relatively. The next example is about the Twilio self-service funnel. Overall, Twilio has a pretty healthy growth funnel. However, there was a general perception that our international onboarding left a lot to be desired. To validate this, we deep-dived into our North Star metric related to product activation. We segmented between Twilio US and international, first as a whole, and then country by country. We weren't surprised to see conversion being lower outside of the US. What we weren't sure was why. To get answers, we started with our top country, the UK. Our theory was, if we couldn't even fix the UK, we can forget the rest. So we mined our onboarding survey for feedback. We ran competitive benchmarking against other regional or local competitors, and we took a customer-centric delivery, sorry, discovery approach. We used Twilio's core jobs to be done to map out exactly how UK customers were either not served at all or underserved. We then formed hypotheses, ran tests to zone in one, what exactly we needed to change. As a product manager, I believe it's easy for you to think that everything's broken in your product and you want to fix everything. I totally get that, but the reality is you can't really fix everything because you don't have unlimited resources. So an action-oriented approach to discovery is crucial in helping you focus on what truly matters to your customers. The third one, speed versus scale. You may be dissatisfied with my third lesson as I don't have an easy answer to offer. The age-old question of, should you build for speed or scale, my answer is, it depends. And I'll show you through two examples. So I once did localization at a zero to one startup. It was company of 30. We were still trying to find product market fit. Our approach to localization was constrained. Due to our limited runway, we had no choice but to optimize for ARR. So we decided to brute-force our way through and add a two-nil locales. We didn't have time to craft our own UX copy, so we co-wrote them with our prospect customer. Localization was 100% menu and flaky. Many of our choices we made back then still make me wins today, but we needed the deal. In moments like this, do the things that don't scale. And delight your customer instead. Now, let me contrast that with how we've approached localization at Tulio. A little bit of extra context. We were targeting five-plus new locales. Our product web assets set on a rather diverse tech stack, which was a result of organic hypergrowth and through acquisitions. Meeting everyone where they were would have been prohibitively expensive and inefficient. So we decided to centralize and platformize. Our team evaluated different internationalization standards and picked one. We built tools and processes to enable teams to become self-sufficient in internationalizing. For example, we provided a linting tool. We centralized and automated localization. So as soon as anybody merged a pull request, we would detect if localization applies and kick off the end-to-end process, including QA. This took all of the individual disparate, repeated effort away from many, many product teams. So as a result, not only did we gain internal efficiency, more crucially, we were able to provide high-quality, consistent, localized customer experience at lightning speed to market and scalability. As I prepared for my talk, I reflected upon what I learned. Quite honestly, it became obvious to me that international expansion is not different from any other product management roles. It's highly context-dependent. My recommendation is to treat international just as another customer segment. Lean into your PM fundamentals, roofless prioritization, customer centricity, be data-driven, leverage storytelling, and make well-reasoned trade-off decisions. These are all skills that you possess already today. So it actually sounds quite simple, don't you think? Let's go global with your product.