What Language Do You Speak?

Mihaela Draghici at UXDX Europe. Video: https://youtu.be/t1x92LwDAZg

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

A multilingual product manager

[00:00:00] Hi everyone, I'm really pleased to meet you. Thank you for the invitation. I'm really excited to be part of this year's UXDX conference. As you already know, my talk is going to be about "What language do you speak?" I'm going to touch upon how to adapt your communication depending on different languages and cultures, but also depending on differences in disciplines, professional backgrounds or seniority levels of the people you interact with. To begin with, I'd like to tell you a bit about myself and my story, so that you understand what I'm talking about and get a bit more context around where this topic came from and what I'm going to present today.

[00:00:37] My name is Mihaela Draghici. I currently work as a product manager for Volkswagen Digital Solutions, the software development center in Lisbon, Portugal. I'm originally from Romania. I lived and worked in the UK for over seven years before I moved to Portugal. So, as you can probably guess, I speak Romanian and English, and I'm currently learning Portuguese. I'm proud to say I've reached a decent level of fluency.

[00:01:18] I have a bachelor's degree with a major in English and a minor in French. I studied literature and linguistics, and alongside that I studied Spanish and Italian. So, as you can see, I am multilingual. Funnily enough, throughout my studies I wanted to become a French teacher. I wanted to work with the European Commission as an interpreter and translator. As you can see, none of that happened. I moved on to work as a marketing manager and then moved on to product manager roles, working with very technical teams, with engineers and data scientists.

[00:01:58] I felt for a while that my studies had gone to waste. I was saying, well, I've gone through all of these 12 years and now I'm not using anything from what I've learned in my day-to-day work. It took me a while to realize that actually my studies have benefited me greatly, and that I'm using a lot of the knowledge from my high school, university and master's degree in my day-to-day work and in my interactions with different stakeholders, with users, with my colleagues. I'm going to give you some examples throughout the presentation.

[00:02:38] The insights I'm offering are mostly coming from my experience as a product manager: firstly, working in London with remote teams in Asia and Europe and building global products, and also from my current experience, working in Lisbon on building software for users in Germany.

Three things we'll cover

[00:02:38] So what are we going to talk about today? We're going to talk about how to build stronger connections and relationships with your stakeholders. Of course, English is the common work language in many companies that we are part of nowadays. However, most of our colleagues and most of our stakeholders come from different countries, so English is not their native language, and it's important to be able to understand each other, to make sure we get the right things from each other, even if we are not native English speakers.

[00:03:16] The second point I will touch upon is making sure we understand our users and build the right products to suit their needs, irrespective of where our users come from. That's very important nowadays, because we mostly build products for global use, or build products for specific markets. And the third point is about how you can translate information for different stakeholder groups, for people who come from different professional backgrounds or have different levels of expertise, and how you need to adapt your communication to that.

Speaking someone's language

[00:03:47] Now I would like to touch upon building stronger connections and stronger relationships with stakeholders. You might ask, "OK, so what's this whole thing about being multilingual? How has being multilingual benefited you, apart from the fact that you can understand more memes and listen to songs in their original languages?" It actually helped me a lot throughout my years as a product manager, because I managed to create closer relationships and connections with my colleagues, first of all, and my stakeholders.

[00:04:28] There's a quote by Trevor Noah, the stand-up comedian, who wrote something really interesting in his book. He said, "When you make the effort to speak to someone in their native language, even if it's basic phrases here and there, what you're basically saying to people is, I understand you. I understand that you have a culture and identity that exists beyond me. I see you as a human being."

[00:05:08] I love this statement, because if you go by it, it helps you create a closer relationship and show your colleagues or collaborators that beyond the fact that they have a role in the business, or in the company, or in the product you're working on, they are individuals, they are human beings. You show that you care, you show empathy. And how can you show that you care? You can start your calls or your meetings by taking five minutes here and there to ask your stakeholders about their day, about how they're feeling, or if you can help them in any way. And you can do that by speaking their language, for example, if that's possible.

[00:05:50] This way you show that you want to go beyond the simple "let's talk about work, let's talk about the technical things we need to clarify at the moment." You show that you're interested in that person's culture, in their origins. You connect to them on a different level by showing empathy. I had a lot of situations where I used to do this with my stakeholders from France or Italy, for example. Once they got past the surprise of finding out that I could actually speak their language, we could have these genuine, honest conversations and relate on a different level before moving on to the agenda of that specific meeting. It was always enriching for me, and for them as well.

[00:06:30] And you say, "OK, fine, you're multilingual. Not everyone is." That's true, but you don't necessarily need to be proficient in a foreign language to have these kinds of connections and relationships. Sometimes it takes just a few basic, simple words that you can say here and there to show that you care about your colleagues or collaborators and that you're willing to go the extra mile. Sometimes it's as simple as a "Ça va" in French. What you're reading here is actually a fully legit conversation in French. So it's as simple as that in many cases.

Understanding non-native and native speakers

[00:07:10] Moving on to another topic, with regards to working with people whose native language is not English. Sometimes it takes extra focus, extra consideration, to understand what people want to say, especially when English is not their native language, and I'm going to give you a few examples. I had a recent situation, actually. We got a message a few weeks ago from one of our colleagues in a different department, giving us information that they were just made aware that a specific value "supposed to be missing and for the contract, we cannot confirm this." What you would read from this is that the value should be missing from the contract, but they cannot confirm.

[00:08:24] What they actually meant was: it was reported that the value was missing for the contract, but we actually know it is present. What you can see in this example is that it's essential that you really understand the messages you receive from your stakeholders and your colleagues, that you double-check the information, maybe ask for clarification, maybe ask for confirmation of what they meant, to make sure you got it right. Otherwise you risk taking wrong decisions, for example. In my case here, I had the advantage of knowing the overall context and also having access to more information from separate conversation channels, which gave me access to other discussions. So I was able to put the pieces together and understand the bigger picture and the actual meaning. This can make or break your next move, your next decision, and what you build in your product.

[00:09:04] Another example I can give here: in many situations, people you talk to find it difficult to come up with a specific word in English to express what they want to say. I don't know if you've been in situations where someone is describing something, or doing a presentation, or introducing a report, and they stop mid-sentence: "Oh, what do you say in English for this specific thing?" You have two options here. You either ask them to say that word in their native language, obviously if you can understand that language, or you can ask them to explain that specific word in their own phrases, and you can work together on coming up with the right meaning in English to make sure you understand each other.

[00:10:20] What about when English is actually someone's native language, and in many cases what they say is not actually what they mean? I think in this case it's very important to pay attention to what people say and try to read between the lines. There's a funny meme online with phrases the British say, what they actually mean, versus what other people understand they're trying to say. I find this really funny, and I think it applies in many other languages as well. In fact, you can think of similar phrases and situations in your own culture and see what you can come up with.

Research in the user's native language

[00:10:59] Moving on to another important topic I want to touch upon here: the users we build products for. Obviously it is essential that we understand our users very well, their contexts, the problems that they have, the needs that they have, in order to build the right products to serve their needs and enable them to benefit from those products. In many cases we build products for specific markets. My current example would be that we're building software for users in Germany. But in other cases we roll out products globally, so we need to make sure that they can be used by people from Brazil, or the United Arab Emirates, or as far as China.

[00:11:39] One of the things to focus on in order to make sure you do that is doing user research in the user's native language. I'm a strong advocate for that in user research, user testing and validation. Why is that? Because sometimes if you ask people to give you feedback, or talk about their problems or their needs, in English, they sometimes struggle to find the right words to express themselves, or they focus too much on the vocabulary, and you lose the aspect of their emotions and their feelings. There are nuances that can be transmitted in a native language that you might lose when you ask people to translate what they feel and what they think. Words express emotion. So it's important to get the real thing from people by allowing them to express themselves in their native language.

Localization and internationalization

[00:12:59] Another important aspect I would like to touch upon is making sure that the products you roll out, apps, websites, SaaS platforms, anything you name it, are available to users no matter where these people come from. Here I would like to touch upon localization and internationalization. I've seen situations where products are rolled out to specific markets of non-English speakers in English, or with poorly translated and poorly localized interfaces, which leads to a poor user experience and overall dissatisfaction and negative user feedback.

[00:13:46] To highlight the importance of internationalization and localization here: first of all, you show that you want to give a good user experience to your users, and by that you show that you care. You also avoid misunderstandings, and you avoid your product being misused. In some cases you can even avoid legal issues. I could have a fully dedicated presentation on internationalization and localization, so to keep this short, I would just like to touch upon some essential points that you should keep in mind.

[00:14:32] One of them is making content understandable and intuitive for users. I've seen situations where interfaces and platforms are built with English as the starting language and then translated from that into other languages. It is important to make sure you don't do a literal translation into any language, but actually think of what the equivalent phrases or words are in a specific language, because something might sound OK in English but be off, or total nonsense, in French or Arabic or German. You need to make sure that the sentences, the calls to action and the messages you have in your interfaces are intuitive and relevant for users in their own language.

[00:15:20] To give some simple illustrations, you have this very basic example with the "unexpected error" message, which I've seen translated into French in many ways, and these are the two most common ones I've come across. And another example, also from English to French: if a French user read this, they would not quite understand what it means, because it doesn't really make sense in French. So again, this illustrates how important it is that in the specific language you're translating into, the meaning is relevant for the user.

[00:16:04] The same goes for using the right local language. Again, it's not as simple as, "Oh, we're releasing for the German market, let's translate the interface into German," because the German spoken in Germany is different from the one spoken in Austria or the one spoken in Switzerland, for example. And the same with Portuguese. If you want to roll out the product in Brazil, make sure that your interface is available in Brazilian Portuguese: first of all, to show respect for your users, and second, because many words in Brazilian Portuguese have different meanings from the ones in Portuguese. So just make sure you cover the right local language. The same applies for French, for example, and many, many other languages.

Terminology and special characters

[00:16:40] Another point would be adapting specific terminology, depending on the industry you're working in, to the local market specifics. It could be automotive, education, finance, travel, fashion. Make sure that the specific terminology is adapted to the local market context. I'm going to give a very simple example to illustrate this. In the world of cars, in dealerships, when salespeople are talking about placing car orders and signing car contracts, there is a very common term they use for a specific identification number for a specific car, a serial number if you like, which in English is "commission number." In German it's "Kommissionsnummer." It's similar.

[00:18:06] But this translates to "número da comissão" in Portuguese, which actually means order number in English. And it translates to "număr de referință" in Romanian, which would be reference number in English. So, as you can see, commission number means something else in other languages, and it's referred to as something else. If you try to translate commission number literally into Romanian in that specific context, it might mean something else, or it might not mean anything at all for the salespeople, and it would take them a long time to figure out what we're talking about. These kinds of examples are meant to illustrate that it's very important that terminology is not translated literally, but adapted to the specifics of a certain market.

[00:18:44] Another interesting point to highlight here is making sure that your platform, your interface, supports special characters. Make sure you have the right encoding, and do very thorough testing, because you want to avoid situations like this. There are a lot of points with regards to internationalization, like date and time formatting, number formatting, other special characters or currency formatting, that we could touch upon here, but I would like to leave it at this for now.

Translating for different stakeholder groups

[00:19:24] Moving on to the next topic, which is about being able to translate information for different stakeholder groups. I was mentioning earlier that English is currently the most common language spoken in many of the companies we are part of, where we have people coming from different backgrounds and nationalities, but we're using English to communicate on a daily basis. However, the language that we use differs depending on the disciplines and the roles people have, their professional backgrounds, their expertise or seniority levels. So in this case I'm talking about how to adapt your language to talk to your engineers, to your business stakeholders, to senior-level management or to the data team. It's very important to adapt your language to what is relevant for each stakeholder group.

[00:20:02] One specific example: if you think of product manager job descriptions, one of the requirements in there is being able to translate business requirements into technical specifications. That's always one of the key parts of a product manager role, and I want to give some examples around also being able to translate into business talk. For me, this was a key challenge, especially because I was coming from a non-technical background, so I had to learn a lot.

[00:20:41] To illustrate this with a specific case: a customer success representative from your company has been in touch with a client that's having issues getting prices for the options they've configured on the product they're purchasing. You go to your engineering team and they say, "Well, actually, the service we're using returns a 500 error when we do our GET requests, and there's a null in the response bodies. We don't know much about it, but we're working with the other team to fix the issue." You can't really give this information to a customer success representative, because they won't understand much from it. They'll be like, "OK, what are you talking about? What does it mean?"

[00:21:22] So you need to adapt it so they can relay it to the clients as well. You can say something more simple, like: we cannot access the price quotes from the provider, and we're working with the teams to identify the problem. We'll let you know as soon as we have more information, because at that stage you actually don't have more details. Another example: your engineering team says, "Well, what are the new accepted values for the transaction status? We need to update our API in our folder so that team X knows what to send in their request." You need to get that from your business stakeholders, and instead of saying all of this to them, you can simply ask them what the acceptable statuses, or the possible statuses for the transaction, might be.

[00:22:30] Another situation is translating business requirements for your engineers or your data engineers. Let's take this example: your commercial director would like to know what the adoption rate is for the new campaign manager feature in the APAC and EMEA regions over the last quarter, compared to the previous quarter. You go to your data engineers, and you need to give them specific data points and more instructions on what you would like included in the report, so that you make sure you get enough data to compile what your commercial director has requested.

Talking to senior management

[00:23:05] Another illustration here would be talking to your senior management. In many cases you want to communicate with directors or heads of departments or C-level execs. They're very busy people. They receive a lot of communications and a lot of information every day, and you want to give them some key information and make sure it gets to them and they read it. For example, you have a yearly report on the success of your product. It has a lot of information, and you want to communicate that to your senior management.

[00:23:46] An easy way to do it would be to send an email or a message, or whatever communication channels you commonly use in the company, and just use some key numbers that you would like to highlight, for them to read through very quickly and easily understand what information you're trying to tell them. Just make it easy for them to read at a glance: that's it, that's the key information I want to send. And then, of course, make the full report available for their later reference, if they want to check more details. In some cases it's even better if you don't use any words, and replace words with graphs or images that can very easily bring clarity to your message in a very concise way.

Recap

[00:24:23] To recap, I've given you various examples of how using the right language can help you build great products: by helping you create closer and stronger relationships with your stakeholders; by better understanding your users, their problems and their needs, and making sure you build products that cater for these needs and can be easily used and accessed by your end users; and, last but not least, by translating information and communicating across different disciplines, levels of expertise and roles within your company or with your collaborators, to make sure that you get the right message across.

[00:25:40] I hope this information is useful for you all and you can take some learnings from what you found out today. If you would like to keep in touch, you can find me on LinkedIn, Twitter and Medium. I'm happy to answer any of your questions related to this presentation or product management in general. Thank you very much.