LOCALIZATION PM AT DROPBOX

hello hello and welcome to silicon valley pro we're about to start a zoom call with erica nakamura who's working at dropbox this time we're going to talk about localization project manager role let's do it we have erica here and thank you so much for joining erica and erica has been working as a localization project manager at dropbox for six years can you tell us a little bit about your background and how did you end up becoming a localization project manager sure first of all thank you for having me today this is really exciting um i have been on the localization team at dropbox for six years now and for the past two years i've been a localization project manager and i am currently based in the bay area working out of our headquarters well which is now home at the moment because of covid but before that i was working out over tokyo office as a japanese language specialist so i've taken on different roles within the team before that i have been an in-house translator at a large corporation so i've been doing localization for 10 plus years now but i've taken on different roles within the localization industry so basically you started working at dropbox as a translator before you transitioned into localization project management um yes kind of so uh what a language specialist does in any language is sort of not the exact translation work from scratch but we work with translation vendors and translation partners that do our translation work for us but we take that content and sort of make sure that the quality is high for a japanese audience and also i discuss with our sales teams marketing teams communications teams growth teams and make sure that the messaging we have in whatever content that we translated into japanese for um is catered towards our japanese audience and not just a sort of a pure uh translation from our english content which was originally uh cater towards our american audience so it's not it's about sort of the editing and reviewing and massaging the language so that um it is in high quality and for that um my role was the japanese portion of that so what is the difference between localization internalization and uh translation translation yes yes um people say a lot of different people you know use it interchangeably and i know i understand it's really confusing um so how i look at it and in general is internationalization is in software development it's more of the engineering side of globalizing a content so making sure your product and your source code of your product can be localized and translated into different languages or making sure that you can support different currencies on your product or different date formats things like that that require engineering work to make sure that your product can be localized so that's internationalization whereas localization and translation is more of the side of the work so it involves you know the pure translation from the source language for example english into japanese or english into different languages and also localization so um what i did as a language specialist making sure it's culturally sensitive to your audience um the format uh is appropriate in your business culture for example that's a part of localization um we have a we always use a pretty good example at dropbox um about a dropbox product uh costing almost around three cups of coffee but that coffee doesn't always translate well in different cultures if you don't drink coffee you don't know how much a cup of coffee costs right you might be drinking tea you might just not drink coffee at all so things like that it's you don't always think about it but that's a cultural aspect that needs to be changed so um that's a that's the more cultural and the linguistic side of globalizing a product so internationalization is more engineering and localization and translation is more linguistic it's how i would categorize it i see so be able to work as a localization project manager uh for the japanese market you have to understand the culture of japan right so you have to be like native or somewhat familiar with the with the culture yes that becomes a very important part of your work and it was really beneficial for me to be sitting with the tokyo team in japan uh and just talking to them about their day-to-day and who their customers were and um what types of content that their customers liked um just being on the ground and talking to the people there in japan was really important for me to absorb um what the local business culture was like and apply that to my day-to-day work so yeah i would say that um having the cultural knowledge of your language or your locale is important so i could become a localization project manager from on russian market let's say if i speak russian right yeah i understand like okay that word doesn't fit in here like it's really offensive for example yeah yeah it's it's not just the translation but sort of the cultural background if you have that you're you could be a language specialist let's talk about the technical part like let's say that you have a project like we need to localize a new feature for example right dropbox as a localization project manager how would you go about this process so we begin by just being involved in the whole launch team and launching a feature involves many different teams so um it's usually a product manager that sort of leads the herd of people up to launch but there's engineers involved designers ux writers and sales and marketing people that create content so that they can market this new feature or new product so i go talk to them and discuss what the scope is what the timeline of this launch looks like and just give them advice and sort of guide them around what the localization part of this development process is and a lot of times they don't they they all need know that they need to localize their feature before launch but many times they don't understand what that involves so i come in i explain to them about the translation process we have what we call a linguistic quality assurance step an lqa which is kind of like a checking the translation in context so your product translated product is in high quality um and trying to fix bugs with engineers and things like that so there's a whole sorts of things that need to happen in the localization process so i sort of guide the rest of the team through um the localization process what that involves and try to make sure that we have our feature in high quality in all languages and ship globally to our international users so your part would be like just not just translating the product itself into a different language but also deliver the message to the to the users in their own language right so as a project manager it's mainly talking to my internal stakeholders all the teams that are developing the product and also liaising with our translation vendors that does our actual translation of our product so it's a lot of communication and collaboration figuring out timelines making sure things are done on time making sure content is uh done in good quality so it's a lot of juggling content prioritizing content and making sure things get done on time the quality and the messaging is reviewed and strategized by our language specialists so these are sort of the different roles that we take on on the team we have project managers who does the operational side go talk to our product managers and engineers and our stakeholders and also talk to our translation vendors to get things done whereas our language specialists are more focused on the language and the quality and make sure that uh our customers in whatever lane language or country um likes their product and wants to use their products so these are the two sort of main roles that we have on the team and we have different um roles that we take on [Music] okay and uh so i have another question regarding the lpm role itself like you as a project localization project manager do you uh solely work in the t uh in on the project or you have a team that helps you out with that like consists of other lpm so how does it work um we do have several other lpms on the team but it's you we are usually assigned one launch we one lpm is usually assigned to one feature or one product launch let's say that you're launching the feature into multiple countries so that means that uh multiple lpms working on the same feature no actually um so we usually try when we do launch a product or a feature we try to do it globally in all of the 21 non-american english languages that we support at dropbox but as a project manager you are responsible for the entire launch of all languages the linguistic expertise we get help from our translation vendors when you go to work um probably from home right now what is your typical day look like like is it a lot of meetings or is it a lot of looking into content like can you describe that sure so we are a very global team so um some of us lpms are based in the san francisco area but we have a language specialist in tokyo another project manager in dublin and then more language specialists in paris and hamburg so we're a vendor asleep yeah we're a very global team and we're somebody's always working throughout the day so i wake up to basically a full you know email a list of emails um so i catch up on my emails to figure out what was happening while i was sleeping um and so i go i look at new new requests would come in while i'm sleeping um vendors would ask me questions and things like that so i basically go through all the emails in the morning and in my case i was working with a couple translation vendors that were based in europe so i would have calls with them in my morning and that could be about making sure that all of the jobs that i've been handing over to them are in progress and on time and um another thing could be i was running a program on the team to ensure that uh our translated content was in high quality so i was running this program where we would sample some of the translated content that was done by one vendor and give it to another vendor for them to check and give us like sort of like a third party feedback um to make sure objectively our translation vendor was giving us great content so i would talk be talking to my european vendor in the morning around on that program as well so morning i had i usually have morning calls with the vendors another thing i spent a lot of time on as a project manager is working on these the localization bugs that come up through these linguistic qa process so once the linguists get a chance to look at their translated content in context they find some linguistic or functional bugs in their language so they raise them to me and i get a list of it's basically like a spreadsheet with a list of all the bugs that needs fixing before launch so i go through and sort of triage all the bugs to make sure that the bigger bugs are fixed immediately the lower bugs or any of the linguistic bugs that we can just fix on our team gets fixed on our end so a lot of bug triaging to make sure that our product um all the bugs on our products are addressed before a launch and i spent a lot of time doing that as well um and then we get a lot of we have a slack channel on our team and people can ask us questions about localization and so we do spend some time answering questions on um localization strategy or sometimes people just ask me how many languages do we support at dropbox and so we we do spend a lot of time answering questions that come from our fellow dropboxers as well so i've heard that you work a lot with the vendors and [Music] if we take the in-house team uh whom do you work most with um the in-house team as in the dropbox team yeah like product managers um engineers okay sure um i work closely with the product managers just because they're usually in charge of um a feature or a product launch so they are the sort of the leader of the pack trying to rally everybody to come together with bring their expertise to launch a particular feature so product managers are usually the people that i collaborate with most because i bring to the team to the launch team the localization expertise and i guide the project manager and the rest of the team through the localization process so i think it would be the product managers thank you um what tools are what tools do you use during your like localizing localization project um on our team we use things like jira for project general project management a lot of requests come through in jira tickets that we process we being on the localization team we also use what we called a translation management system or tms which is like just a product that allows you to it's a software that allows you to do translation work um and have things capabilities like translation memory or like having glossary uploaded or style guide uploaded so it's a tool that allows us to upload the source english content and the linguist can do the actual translation in that content or in that tool and then this tool will have a translation memory where they will save all the completed translation so if something similar comes in the future and we need to do a similar types of translation we the linguists don't have to do everything from scratch but the translation memory will have your previously done translation memorized and they will pull it up for you so that the linguists can save time and also maintain consistency within the translations so that's a big portion in terms of all the tooling that we use on a day-to-day basis and of course we're in dropbox all day every day saving files and editing files all the time so we're definitely deep into dropbox every day too let's talk about the people who are trying to get into the localization project management um can you tell us um like what skills and what requirements are needed for a person who would like to become a localization project manager um you don't need a particular degree um to be a project manager uh i was myself was a linguist a translator when i started being in the localization industry and sort of switched roles and now i'm a project manager so um you don't need a particular degree but um it would be great to have if you have if you can speak in other languages that would be great but it's also not necessary but being interested in different cultures and languages is always a plus but it's a lot about prioritizing and communicating with people and also evangelizing your work so that other people at the company knows what to do with you how to collaborate with you and i think one of the key aspects of being a localization project manager and doing any work i think is having empathy a lot of the times if you are talking to people that just speak english um it's hard for them to understand um the importance of localization importance of translating the product into different languages but that's where you have to sort of be an advocate for you know the rest of the world basically and just have them imagine what if you didn't speak a word of french and all of this product was in french would you use the product and the answer likely will be no so it's just having that empathy and the imagination of what if i didn't speak a particular language what challenges will i face if i if that product was in that language that i don't understand so um it's there isn't a pr one particular thing that you need or a degree that you have to have to become a project manager on the localization team but i think having um empathy and being able to share that and communicate that with others i think is really important so what i have understood that is that uh having a little bit of project management background can actually help you to become a localization project manager yes and it doesn't you don't have to be um a localization project manager you could be um coming from any project management or program management background and that's very much applicable to an lpm role as well because it's at the end of the day it's all about juggling multiple things trying to get things done on time talking to people and prioritizing so a lot of that is just project management and program management that's interesting because recently i've been researching about the localization project management certifications or educational programs and funny thing is that i found a few so guys you don't have to go to school to be a localization project manager maybe just uh if you get a certificate in project management will actually lead you to if you want to become a localization project manager so if somebody is interested and wants to start where should they start i think there's multiple ways to get into the localization industry one is sort of becoming a translator if you're bilingual or trilingual or multilingual you can do that you can start as working on at the translation of vendors side and they have obviously linguists reviewers um project managers um there as well so that's a great way to get into localization can you make a couple of companies that you know the vendors the people sure sure there's bigger there's really big companies there's numerous just so many language service providers out there in the world and i've worked with many of them um there are large uh translation uh language service providers i'd say places like lion bridge um we localize um moravia yeah there's there's so many different vendors to choose from and they they all provide great service i also wanted to mention about moravia that they uh employ you as a contractor into like high-tech companies such as like apple for example and you basically work at apple translating into a different language but work for a different company which is a great experience to start yes absolutely when i did my research i saw a lot of positions in localization project management because a lot of companies they going global especially like when everything is online nowadays so um being localization project manager is in high demand right now so and it's super interesting as well like working on different cultures and languages exciting yeah i think it's there's no downside to localizing your product the more you localize the more users you will have and if you do a good job around it you know your product will be successful globally so there's so many benefits to globalizing your product in your company so yeah i think there there should be high demand in my personal opinion yeah and we have another thing that we might not forget is a bonus so our viewers will have a chance to receive a um consultation i'm happy to chat with anybody um that's interested in the localization field it's a pretty niche field um and so people i'm sure are curious about what we do on the localization team and i've done a lot of chats with people actually um that are curious about localization and trying to get into the localization field and just chat with them and explain to them what i do so i'm i'm definitely happy to do that leave your comment below with the questions about the localization project management role i will send them to erica and erica will choose the most interesting ones three three most interesting ones and those people who had the most interesting questions uh will can get a ch um you know on a phone or on a zoom meeting with with erica thank you so much i can't even express how much i'm thankful and grateful for you joining us today and i'm wishing you a good luck in your localization project management journey and thank you so much again thank you thank you everyone for viewing this and thanks for an opportunity to chat about localization this is great

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Keywords: localization project manager, localization project management, lpm, dropbox stock, licalization project manager dropbox, job interview tips, job interview questions and answers, job interview, career opportunities, career change, career coach, project manager, project manager interview, project management, project manager job interview, project manager job interview questions and answers, silicon valley, silicon valley pro, job at tech company, tech, techy

Id: McWGb1q4Cy4

Length: 26min 23sec (1583 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 08 2021