Product localisation

Lecturio GmbH

Industry: Edtech SaaS, healthcare | Location: Berlin | Role: Product Manager

This product improvement allowed non-English speaking users to enjoy a full-blown product experience in their preferred language. It successfully increases registration rates, the number of leads, and first-time buyers. This project helped to bridge the language barrier and make our products more accessible to a broader audience on a global scale, ultimately driving growth and success.

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👀 Research & getting insights

User Interview & customer discovery

I lead a team of working students to conduct qualitative and quantitative research on specific topics and/or product features regularly. It aims to have a better understanding of users' values, pain points, and experiences. From there, I have learned that linguistic localisation is critical in the process of business growth in a new market.

Product data analytics

After receiving user feedback from qualitative interviews, I moved on to extract demographic and user activation data from Google analytics and PowerBI. I discovered that there’s a significant growth in the number of users among Spanish-speaking countries, especially in the Central America region. However, this doesn’t contribute to an increase in user activation rate.

Product backlog refinement

Regular cross-functional communication is essential for learning more about users’ needs. Collaborating with the customer success and sales team, I collected valuable insights and turn them into actionable feedback during product backlog refinement. My team and I found that more users requested to have a language selector.

🔎 Ideation

Once I collected these insights, my team and I can then develop a more informed understanding of the problem. I held some ideation sessions with the cross-functional team to observe the problems, review product strategy and potential business impact, make hypotheses and generate feasible solutions through creating personas, prototyping, user journey mapping, and building user flow.

  • Age: 21 | Location: Mexico City

    Status: Final year student of an undergraduate course in science

    Likes: Music, video games, tech obsessed | Dislikes: Cooking, shopping

    Goals: Register for ​​MCAT® exam this year and score at least 515

    Motivations: Studying abroad and working in the US has always been Max’s dream. He is curious to experience student life overseas. By achieving high score in MCAT® exam, he’d be able to enroll in medical school in the US

    Pain points: He doesn’t have many practice questions to study in his university. He feels frustrated to study sometimes since English is not his first language. He is unfamiliar with the MCAT® exam interface

  • Age: 24 | Location: Texas

    Status: Medical student at McGovern Medical School, part-time waitress

    Likes: Reading and fashion | Dislikes: Sports

    Goals: Passing USMLE Step 1 as a retaker

    Motivations: Paula has already failed once in her previous USMLE Step 1 exam. As the majority of her classmates have passed and moved on to preparing for the USMLE Step 2 exam, she is so worried and stressed that she will be left behind.

    Pain points: She’s under financial pressure as an overseas student that she has to take a part time job aside from her study. She is looking for some affordable learning resources to practice USMLE Step 1 sample questions whenever and wherever she wants, even during work breaks in the kitchen. She’d appreciate it if there's a Spanish explanation on each question, so that she can understand complex medical concepts right away.

  • Age: 20 | Location: Malaga

    Status: Medical student at Universidad de Málaga

    Likes: Skating, family time, tech savvy | Dislikes: Diving, swimming

    Goals: Passing course and subject exam

    Motivations: Jorge wants to make his family proud by becoming a physician in the future

    Pain points: He often gets distracted from studying since he and his friends are very outgoing and adventurous. Since social life has occupied most of his time, he needs to find an efficient way to study instead of reading a textbook in a library.

🧍 Personas

Here are some of the personas my team and I created during the personas workshop. By defining relevant persona attributes, I can better understand Spanish-speaking users' needs and problems across the B2C market segment. Once I have laid down this foundation, it keeps my solutions grounded in building a customer-centric product.

✨ Framing hypothesis

New Spanish speaking users might drop out at the activation stage because they cannot receive immediate value from our product. Therefore, a more accessible and localised interface might help visitors to gain immediate value and understand our product swiftly, making them more likely to complete the activation, hence converting them into subscribers.

We will know this is true when :

1: There is an increase in Spanish users (including Registrations, Leads, FTBs)

2: There is an increase in current users switching to Spanish interface

3: Spanish users recorded a longer session time in feature usage and higher activation rate

These hypotheses are a launching point to investigate further when the project was in the problem discovery phase. The team and I then created prototypes and ran usability tests to work out how to best solve the problems.

📄 Product requirements document

Jour fixe with key stakeholders

A weekly meeting is set up to align goals and show transparency across different levels. I invited C suite executives, the marketing team, and the content team in the Jour fixe to explain the progress, scope, dependencies, etc., and make decisions during the development and integration stage.

Product requirements document (PRD)

I prepared the PRD on Confluence to outline the product's purpose, features, functionality, and behaviour. It serves as a guide for business and technical teams to help build, launch, or market the product. After discussing with the Lead developer, I broke down the project into smaller actionable items and milestones.

🖥️ QA, testing & implementation

Content and marketing QA

Apart from technical implementation, quality content is critical to the success of the product. Therefore, I have lined up freelance translators with content and marketing teams to build a workflow on Weblate. It is to ensure that Spanish translation accurately delivers its intended function to the end user.

Product QA

As long as tasks have been pushed to the staging environment, the QA team would make sure all modules work together smoothly and can communicate with each other. A fallback solution is also tested in case the translation string isn’t working properly.

Acceptance, alpha testing & demo day

The user acceptance test is conducted to ensure that the product meets the requirements and to ensure the functionalities achieve user satisfaction. Followed by an alpha test and bi-weekly demo day, when I’d demonstrate how the new feature works to show transparency to the whole company and identify any bugs or issues before finally releasing the software to the end-user.

Release note & product launch

At the conclusion of this phase, a minimally flawed and stable product is prepared for deployment. I followed up by writing the release note to inform the entire company and celebrated all big & small wins.

Spanish speaking users can enjoy full blown experience in their selected language.

🚀 Key takeaways

  • Cross-functional collaboration leads to better user engagement

  • Building trust with customers is good for the business

  • When things are unclear, get more evidence and run experiments