| Jim |
I’m Jim Compton. I’m a manager of technology partnerships at RWS and today I have here with me Mitchell Cox who is the International Business Operations Manager at Lucid, which is a visual collaboration suite. In this episode we talk about how localization should be tied to accelerating growth and not be an afterthought. Mitchell has described himself as a localization outsider, and has some really interesting ideas including on how translation process maps to customer experience and how giving international users a great customer experience sometimes requires adaption of the product itself.
Mitchell, why don’t you tell us, what is Lucid? What’s your company do? |
| Mitchell |
Yeah, definitely. Thanks, Jim. Excited to be on. So Lucid is a visual productivity suite, with over 30 million global users. We have a few products worth mentioning. Lucid Spark is a digital whiteboard that brings teams together so that they can ideate and act on those ideas. Lucid Chart is an intelligent diagramming solution that enables teams to map out important business processes.
So really focused on the idea of visual productivity for the enterprise and helping bring teams together through cloud based applications so that they can understand their business more effectively. |
| Jim |
Cool. And what do you do specifically for Lucid? What’s your role? |
| Mitchell |
Yeah, I’ve been at Lucid for almost six years now. When I joined, we were a small little 75 person company and now we’re over 650 employees. So it’s been a fun ride. I’ve worked in a number of different areas across the business but for the last four years, my role has focused on leading our international expansion and growth efforts for the company. So originally my role was focused on launching our main product, Lucid Chart, into our first five non-English languages but since then my role’s evolved and shifted to focus more on layering on each part of our business model so that we can accelerate and drive growth for the business within our core international markets. |
| Jim |
Let’s talk about that in particular. What does that look like, this international growth story for Lucid? |
| Mitchell |
Yeah. It’s been a fun journey. In the spring of 2017, we launched Lucid Chart into our first five non-English languages. And we had developed pockets of users in some core international markets and decided that we should better serve those users by giving them the ability to use our product in their local language. And so we launched our product into Spanish, Portuguese, German, French and Dutch.
But as we launched the product in parallel, we also launched well over a hundred marketing pages into local language content from our marketing website, as well as our customer support content, so that we could provide kind of a full customer experience within any one of these local languages. And then since then, since that original launch, we’ve focused on layering every aspect of our business model.
After we launched our product into those first five languages, we quickly pivoted to driving localized marketing acquisition activity, in Spanish, Portuguese, German, French and Dutch.
And then we’ve since layered on localized monetization strategies in those markets, as well as regional sales teams in EMEA and APAC to drive growth on the assistance side of the business in those international markets. And overall, I would say like our focus and my focus in driving some of our international growth is accelerating growth for the business internationally and ensuring that our users in international markets, regardless of language, have a high quality customer experience that’s on par with our US English users.
We want to create a really high quality customer experience and we’ve certainly invested in ensuring that we have really high quality translations. Our content is well localized and our content is consistent across the customer experience. |
| Jim |
That’s, I think, a really interesting perspective that you have, where for you, the localization really is all about growth. It’s about business growth. |
| Mitchell |
Yeah, definitely. I think for us, localization has always been tied to how we can accelerate growth internationally. We see localization as a growth factor for the business and I think that’s allowed us to pour more resources into localization, to our broader international efforts than maybe we would have if we felt like it was something we were just doing to because we should do it. We want to do it, we want to invest, because it’s specifically tied to the business outcomes and accelerating growth for the business. |
| Jim |
So are you able to correlate your efforts with localization to this growth? |
| Mitchell |
Yeah. Yeah, we definitely are. So like I said, we launched originally in 2017 and when we launched our product into our first five non-English languages, I can’t remember the exact number of users that we had globally but I know for a fact that we had zero non-English product users and I think when I last checked, we had over 10 million non-English product users now, in four years and now spread across eight non-English languages. So from a user perspective, I think we can very clearly tie our localization efforts to growth for the business.
If we expand our scope out and look at what are our localization activities doing, I think we can very clearly see that our ability to invest in international markets by launching the product but also in tandem, launching localized marketing efforts and then eventually layering on assisted sales efforts once a specific market is ready for that investment leads to growth for the business. We can definitely see that.
I think that focus on leveraging localization as one part of our broader international strategy has been a really important component of why we’ve been able to be successful internationally |
| Jim |
Can you tell me a bit about that, like other folks that you talked to in the industry. How do you think their processes or philosophy differ from what you’re doing? |
| Mitchell |
Yeah. I’m not sure there’s a right way or a wrong way to do localization. The way we’ve approached it at Lucid though is, our localization team, well, really me, as our localization team has been set up specifically with a broader purview than just localization. So my mandate is not to act as kind of an internal agency and manage translation requests from other areas of the company.
My mandate is to drive international growth for the business. And I am able to bring in other parts of the team, other parts of the org when we feel that localizing specific parts of our customer experience could be beneficial to driving that growth. And so I end up thinking deeply through the quality of our translation content, our translation processes, how we’re working effectively with other teams across the organization.
But at the end of the day, that’s a small part of what I do. I’m much more focused on how many new users did we bring to our product last month across our core international markets and what types of campaigns or things can we do cross-functionally to accelerate that growth and then how does that growth translate into new subscriptions as opposed to how many translations did we successfully send in the last month? |
| Jim |
It sounds like your success criteria is ultimately going to be based on what the business growth, international business growth strategy is. |
| Mitchell |
Yeah, definitely. |
| Jim |
I love this idea that something that you might learn in the localization process would go back to the product and improve the user experience for like an international user. Can you give us maybe an example of something that you’ve learned through localization which did actually change a Lucid product? |
| Mitchell |
Yeah, definitely. So I can walk through one specific example. So about a year ago, on the early part of 2020, our team was changing some parts of our pricing model. And as we were testing some of those changes within international markets, we also were making some improvements to some of the first parts of the product experience that customers would see when they logged in. And we noticed that as we were reviewing some of the data from those tests that a lower number of users were engaging with the product, were creating documents, were coming back to create second documents.
So it seemed like some of the changes might be negatively impacting user engagement specifically within some of our international markets and specifically for non-English users. We want to create a product that has a really high quality customer experience and that users are coming back and using frequently. They’re getting value out of our product quickly and they’re able to come back and use our product regularly to get value out of the diagrams or the boards that they’re creating.
And so as we looked into this data, we were concerned and I jumped into it with some of our members, the members of our product team and our growth teams and started to understand that there was actually a really big discrepancy in one particular part of that initial product experience, that was likely contributing to the drop. And that was the number of product templates that our non-English users had access to. So templates are a really important part of our initial product experience, because a user knows that they want to create some type of business process diagram or an entity relationship diagram or whatever it is.
But it’s really helpful to have an example of what that, of a good diagram could look like and for our non-English users, they only had access to a very limited number of templates, whereas our English users had access to hundreds. And so we identified that this discrepancy could be causing a pretty significant drop in user engagement. And on the backend, we implemented some quick fixes to make that initial product experience around, specifically around templates, much better.
And then we worked with some of our teams internally over the course of the last year to scale the number of templates we had for non-English users to match the number of templates we have for English users. So now, if you’re a Spanish user or if you’re an English user or if you’re a French user, you’re going to have access to hundreds of templates within our product. And we think that that creates a much higher quality product experience for our non-English users than what it was previously.
And I think that is a really helpful example, in my mind, of understanding how we can leverage translation and localization of our content to drive growth and engagement for our product for our non-English users. And I think if localization was just kind of the separate entity that lived in its own org, I think we would have missed that relationship and the experience might still not be really up to par. |
| Jim |
I was wondering about that. I have used Lucid Chart and I know that this idea of like pre-existing content is one of the things that makes it super useful and easy to sort of spin up an org chart or diagram. Do you find that your users in different markets use different types of templates? |
| Mitchell |
Yeah. They definitely do. Users have in different markets, sometimes even in different languages, use our product differently. And so part of my role is also working with our product teams, with our marketing teams to understand some of those differences and then hopefully build localized solutions for users in specific markets or specific languages that matches the needs of those users.
And so how we think about localizing the product experience, I think is very much tied to how users in specific markets are using Lucid Chart or using Lucid Spark. And we want to make sure that the experience feels local to them. And so we try to do everything we can to customize the product or localize the product for specific markets. |
| Jim |
So Mitchell, I know you said you’re kind of the one man localization show there at Lucid. I am curious, when you were tasked with setting up this function, how did you decide like what your processes were going to be, what kind of team or partners or technology would be involved? Take us back to when you got started with this mission. |
| Mitchell |
Yeah. I definitely got thrown into the fire a little bit, not having come from a localization background and essentially being said, Hey, launch, our product and hundreds of marketing pages and our full help center into five languages at once and this is really important for the business and here’s a deadline, like, go do it. And so certainly stumbled out of the gates and had to figure out a lot of things on the fly. I think one of the things that I’ve tried to do that’s been most helpful to ramp quickly and I think effectively, is to talk with peers and to understand how peers are approaching similar problems, what types of tools they’re using to simplify and automate their workflows and processes, how they think through even simple things like which types of content to translate and how to ensure that the quality of your translated content is high. For us, we’ve really relied on our translation management platform and local and language services partner. Since we’ve launched, they’ve helped walk us through some of the early challenges and help us think through trade-offs and how we should approach different parts of our program. But I’ve also been able to talk with peers at companies like Zoom and Slack and Age of Learning and many other companies who have been really helpful, specifically to me, as I try to piece together what a localization program could look like within the context of our business but also taking into account best practices from the industry. |
| Jim |
You mentioned something about the challenge of trying to decide what content to localize. How do you approach that challenge? And I’m also curious how, from a business standpoint, Lucid decides what markets to enter? |
| Mitchell |
Yeah. That’s a really good question. So when we think about markets and which markets to enter from a language perspective, I think we’ve again taken a very business focused approach. And our approach has been rooted in which international markets do we think represent large opportunities for the business, regardless of language and how would adding local language support in that market accelerate our ability to grow effectively there?
And I think because of the nature of our business model, because we’re so self-served driven, so many of our users find us online through SEO, through PPC efforts, or through just organic virality with any given market, our ability to find users as they’re searching for our product is really important. And so, when we’re thinking about which markets we should enter, we look at how many users do we currently have in that market?
What’s the impact of that market on the business? And then what do we think the opportunity is in that market long-term across both our self-serve business and our sales assisted business. And how much of that market share do we think we can capture effectively through if we were to launch by layering on localized marketing activities so that we can kick-start that self-serve acquisition funnel effectively. So that’s been a really important part of choosing markets. |
| Jim |
It sounds like your marketing efforts are a huge driver for your localization activity? |
| Mitchell |
Yeah. That’s definitely true. I partner really closely with our marketing team and with our acquisition growth team to think through which markets we should focus on, how we allocate resources to specific international markets and what types of content we should translate into specific languages so that we can drive growth within a market like Germany or Russia or Italy. And after we launched our product into our first five non-English languages, one of the first things that we did, just to drive that point home, is we quickly brought on an international marketing manager, who then built out a team of local language acquisition specialists to drive SEO and PPC user acquisition within some of our first non-English languages.
And now we have a team of five people at Lucid who are each of them focus solely on driving acquisition in German or French or Spanish or Portuguese or Japanese. And our ability to leverage those resources internally to drive growth has been really important. And I partner really closely with that team to make sure that we’re translating the right types of content and setting up our marketing funnel to kind of accelerate growth for the business. |
| Jim |
So, has your approach to localization for marketing been different from your approach for, let’s say the interface or the, you know, the templates or what we call like localization of the product? |
| Mitchell |
Yeah, that’s a good question. I think it’s definitely been a higher touch approach. For us to translate a piece of marketing content, we need to make sure that it’s translated well and effectively. But we also need to go back and make sure that it’s translated in the right way, in the way that Google or the search engines can read and understand so that we can rank for that content, so that more users see that content. And so that more users then come to our site, register for our product, pay for our product, et cetera.
So in a sense, because of our kind of funnel business model and because marketing and our ability to translate that content effectively in a way that Google or search engines can understand is really important, our marketing content kind of leads through to the rest of our localization program and the other parts of our translation content. We want to make sure that the content we’re translating is consistent across the customer experience.
But because marketing is so important to drive users to the site and then kind of keep the whole business model flowing, we often make sure that we’re translating content in a way that Google can effectively read. And there’s also an understanding that Google, you know, cares about the customer experience and wants to make sure that we’re translating things in a way that people are searching for and people want to understand and learn about.
I think if we had started with the product in mind specifically, we would probably lose out on that piece and it would hurt the broader kind of international efforts more broadly. |
| Jim |
I think this is an interesting idea that when you’re localizing the marketing, the search engine is almost like another stakeholder that you have to serve with the content in addition to the end user, who of course consumes it.
So Mitchell, if you had to go back and do it all over, I’m curious if there’s anything that you would change, or if you have any advice to someone who would be tasked with setting up their own localization department for their startup company. What might you tell them now that you have some experience under your belt with this? |
| Mitchell |
Yeah. That’s a really good question. I think it’s hard to say if I would do things differently because I think we were just learning so much along the way as we were setting up the program. One thing though I am very happy with is how we’ve always led our localization program with a clear focus on how localization impacts our broader international growth and I think that’s been really important for us because of our business model.
But it’s also allowed the team and our internal stakeholders, folks who are also deeply interested in our localization program, to understand that our ability to provide a high quality experience for our non-English users, to drive more non-English users to our site and to eventually monetize those users over time, is a really important part of our business and really important part of our growth strategy broadly.
And so if I were to do things differently, I think I would have focused even more so on that from the beginning because I think it’s enabled us to clearly tie resources and outcomes to our localization program in a way that we wouldn’t get if we weren’t so focused on leveraging localization as just a core part of our international growth trajectory. |
| Jim |
And so what is in store for the future for Lucid’s localization program? |
| Mitchell |
We have a lot of interesting projects on the docket this year. And one of the main projects is trying to understand how we can more deeply integrate our international and non English users into all parts of our product development process. How do we make sure that we’re providing a really high quality product experience for our non-English users? How can we measure that effectively? And how do we make sure that everyone across the company understands that changes we make to the product, changes, new pages that we released on the marketing website, et cetera, all impact users globally.
And we want to make sure that we’re making those changes in a way that treats our non-English users and our international users as kind of first-class citizens and so we’re really focused on continuing to improve all aspects of the customer experience.
I’m also excited; we’re hiring our first localization manager. So we’ve kind of been running this program for the last four years. We’ve never had someone who deeply understands localization and so I’m really excited to bring someone on who can help us drive and evolve our program as we continue to grow and as the number of languages we support, the types of content we support, et cetera, continues to expand. |
| Jim |
Hey, Mitchell, thank you so much for being a guest on the podcast. |
| Mitchell |
Yeah, definitely. And thanks again, Jim. I appreciate being able to come on the show. It’s always fun to talk through some of the things we’re doing. |
