Going global with strong local dependencies
A chance we have with digital products is that once it is successful and has reached product/market fit, going global can be considered with the same product and tech team.
I believe you have products that can be very successful with no or little adaptation. Social media or some productivity tools are a good example. You nevertheless have products requiring a lot more thinking. I had the chance to work on the second kind of products.
Why do we need to adapt?
In a previous company I worked on electronic signature, I then joined a company providing software to HR and am now working on fraud detection leveraging AI. These three businesses have strong local dependencies both on cultural habits and regulations.
When your value proposition is to make signature faster and potentially distributed, you need to win people’s trust, and trust doesn’t mean the same in several cultures.
USA is a jurisprudential system: people shake each other’s hand and it is a deal. You can see this cultural trait in several aspects: contracts are always very long compared to contracts in Europe: we have more rules regulating things where they have everything in the contracts.
Isn’t it going to be too complicated? Aren’t users going to drop here because it requires too much effort?
In France you have ceremonies filming the President sign a contract with XXX because of the value of a handwritten signature. Europe has a very precise regulation (EIDAS) about digital signatures stating several levels of signatures protecting both parties more or less. The product I was working on needed to comply with this regulation for the signature to be a legal proof and the regulation was having technical impacts: the way we were sealing the document or the way we were generating the signing certificate had to follow precise rules.
In the USA, the technology around the signature was already going farther than the official rules so the team felt their tool was super secure. When they realized it was not enough for the European market… the cultural shock was intense! We had to think about new steps in the user flow for a second authentication for example, there, my american colleagues were always curious: “Isn’t it going to be too complicated? Aren’t users going to drop here because it requires too much effort?” and we were explaining that, on the contrary, it will mean more trust and people engaging more with the tool.
Today my product’s value proposition is to help fraud team detect fraud better. Here again you need to adapt to the culture and regulation of your clients: the way people fraud changes from country to country and proving fraud is different too. You have the culture of suing people or not.
In some countries, you can easily go to court to get money from a fraudster or even have them go to jail if the fraud is bad enough where you have other countries where the habit is more to ask for more evidence and wait until the claimant withdraws the claim or just never answers. To prove fraud you have cultures where the claimants are considered never bad intended and so the insurers need a lot of evidence to prove fraud.
You have a cultural thing too with what we call the fraud scenarios: in some countries you will never declare a child has broken your brand new Smartphone because children can’t be used as fake proof.
For these reasons, a product working great in a specific geography will necessarily fail in another without adapting it.
Keep a healthy distance with your users
The first most important point is to acknowledge and understand these differences: know your users, know your client and their expectations / constraints.
We go back to very basic product management practices here but I re-learned what I now think is the product manager greatest danger: think you are the user. Being passionate about your product, eat your own dogfood as we say: to be sure you know its strengths, its weaknesses and you can experience what your users do is key to being good at your job. You should nevertheless keep a healthy distance: you are not your user!
Both aspects are essential and the second one is maybe less known. Today it is easier for me as a product manager because I never worked as a fraud handler for an insurer but I kept this in mind when I was working on electronic signature where I was in fact a user but not representative of most of our users (even if a little bit for French users ;-)). Once the difference is clearly documented, understood and shared. You can start adapting your product to these local challenges.
Make your product stronger
It will probably mean go back to some important choices you made before. The user experience can be different, the algorithms you use too. The good news is that it will probably make your product more robust if done right (abstracting things to allow then local specificities to be painlessly configured) and it will have opened your mind on other ways of thinking 😊
