Recently I came across this very interesting book called "O Paladar não Retrocede" by Carlos...
Speaking local means to integrate regional details into your product experience and performance. This is international product development.
To make your digital product international, you need to understand the needs and the behaviour of your users in other cultures. Once you have this, you need to find a way to integrate this knowledge into your product development in a way that is sustainable and scalable. Finally, connect this upstream to the business strategy and downstream to user feedback and you have a circular process of input and output that will allow you to be more adaptive to user demand and respond adequately and timely.
Adapt to your users and your users will adopt your product in all cultures you serve.
How to do this without creating a different product per country?
1 - Invest in cross-culture user research and systematize learnings based on the product´s user journey. How do users in different cultures like to be onboarded, how to they do decision-making, how do they build trust? Similarities in these bahaviours will allow you to bundle countries.
2 - Elements of UX design, content design, multilingual content, UX copywriting, brand guidelines, internationalization and legal can be systematized and templatized in an integrative design system that allows to replicate the solutions in the right parts of the user journey. Combining this with user regional knowledge and user journey mapping will allow to operationalize the adaptation of the product experience and performance both in terms of messaging and experience.
3 - Business goals will determine focus and investment of what needs to be adapted and allow to create success indicators and metrics. Continuous direct user feedback will keep you in touch with how users are reacting to the adapted experience and performance and allow you to continuously optimize it.
4 - Last, but not least, have a localization manager that will cross-functionally align this international effort as well as manage the localization solutions, establish a connection with the business, create an automatized process for content to flow and consult internally about international adaptation. Allow this manager to work at a high-strategical level inviting them to sit at the table of strategic decisions and to report to a c-level, so that they can move fast.
Meet client demand in a different culture with international product development. Think global, but speak local!
