Global Product Management

One of the amazing things about doing web-based products and services is watching how quickly the service gets adopted internationally. With global access, and with good site analytics tools, we can see the service start to spread around the globe. But these of course are the early adopters, and for most products and services, we have considerable work to do to get the product working appropriately and successfully in countries around the world.

This note is not about what it takes to internationalize and then localize a product – I am assuming you know at least the basics of dealing with things like local language, currency, shipping, payment, content and support.

Instead, this note is about how the product manager can possibly be responsible for a product that will be sold to people he has never met, to people that speak a language he doesn’t understand, subject to laws that he isn’t aware of, and pay by mechanisms he has never used.

In the early days of the Internet, many companies just did a US-based product, and then passed the source code over to another group, or even another company (or a joint venture), to try to turn the product into something that’s useful in another country. There were of course obvious problems with this. First, it took a long time, often as long as 6 months to a year, for the software to become available in those other countries. Second, every time the US team made a new release, the process would essentially have to start again as the changes required were rarely incorporated into the US system. Third, the other group may have understood the new geography better, but they often didn’t understand the original product very well.

So most companies that were serious about the market beyond the US border realized that they had to do something different. They had to start treating the various country-specific versions of the product as one product, intended for a global market, and out of this need came the notion of the “global product manager” responsible for the single global product.

This single global product is still meant to be localized to the different markets, but the hardest problems are not usually associated with the localization, it is in enabling the necessary localizations by first defining a general enough and configurable enough core product such that i can be tailored to the needs of local geographies. We call this process of make software configurable for different geographies “internationalization.”

There are several important similarities between a global product manager and a platform product manager. I have written earlier about the challenges
of platform product management, especially in that you are building something intended to be used in very different ways, and how one of the keys is that the platform product manager must work closely with several application developers as they together explore and discover the necessary platform functionality. The same concept applies for the global product manager. He must work closely with people knowledgeable about the target countries to explore and discover the areas of the product that must be configurable and adaptable to meet the needs of the users in these countries.

One way to do this is for the product manager to make this a key priority and spend the time necessary to learn about the users, applicable laws, payment mechanisms and such, but this can of course take considerable time and travel. So especially larger companies realized that they can hire people that specialize in the local needs of specific geographies, and that’s where the notion of a “country product manager” came from.

The global product manager works with one or more country product managers to discover the areas that must be configurable to meet the needs of the different geographies.

Sometimes the country product managers are based near the global product managers (in this case we sometimes call them “international product managers”), but most of the time they are based in their responsible geography. There are obvious pros and cons to each, but in my experience either can work but be warned that significant communication and effort is required either way, and the global product managers must be actively encouraged and incented to work closely with the country product managers.

The country product managers also play a true product management role on the localization of the product for their local geography.

Many companies still struggle with global product management largely because they are trying to optimize their company around the US product and US market, and the notion of taking some time to identify global requirements and then build a global product that must then be localized for the US is not something most US business owners are anxious to do. This is why successful global product and service companies require a commitment by the senior management of the company that they are willing to make some trade-offs in order to ensure they can be successful on the global stage and not just in their own backyard.

Companies that are really good at global product are able to use their country product managers for more than just input on the global product and localizing product, but they can deploy early in specific countries to get early feedback (geographical deployment can be a very effective gentle deployment technique), and they can also work on general product discovery in country.

I want to point out that I have actually oversimplified things a little here. I have been talking about this as if there’s basically one release to the entire world, but in truth most companies do prioritize the world based on market opportunity. It’s common to have several tiers. The first tier might be major proven markets such as US, Canada, Germany, and the UK. The second tier might add India, China, Japan and Brazil. And a third tier might add smaller countries. Note that the opportunity for a country is not simply a matter of size, but rather the number of target customers and users that are willing and able to buy the product. Many companies are very anxious to sell to China, India and Brazil, for example, but the broadband penetration may not exist yet for the type of customers they are targeting.

If your company is at the point where you realize you need to expand beyond the market in your native country, these techniques can help you scale your efforts to meet the opportunities provided by a much larger world market.