How do you build for your customers without knowing them?

For the most part of my product management career, I have worked as a product manager/head of an Indian product. But doing product management at a global level for a company like Amazon has been a different learning experience.

With the world becoming smaller and global companies opening their tech and product centers in India, career opportunities of global product management are only bound to grow.In this article, I talk about some of these differences and challenges associated with building a global product and what it means to do global product management.

Developing for a customer you have never met — One of the most fundamental need of product management is to know one’s customer. You meet a lot of customers, know them, their culture, way of shopping, what bothers them, what their pain-points are. But when you are developing a global product, your product is likely to be used by people who are very different. Be it their language, culture, pain-points, payment preferences, or the infrastructure of their country, its supply chain or even regulations; every thing is just so different. So how do you build for them without absorbing these key differences? How do you take into account each geographies’ problems and build solutions that are geography agnostic? Add to it the complexity of build and release cycles itself, given that each feature needs to be signed off by multiple countries’ PMs to minimize tech overload.

The answer lies in having both global and country specific product managers on the team.

The role of a global PM is to:

1. Work with each country PM in coming up with a global roadmap — While the country PMs come with a deep knowledge of their geography, the global PM works with them to pool in their requirements into a global roadmap.
2. Prioritize the laundry list of features in the global roadmap — Global PMs are responsible for prioritizing the features in the global roadmap. Problems which are common across all geographies must be solved together and can be prioritized much higher in the list of features to build than problems which impact only a few geographies. Global PMs are expected to do a stringent prioritization and re-prioritization of features, do stakeholder management among the country specific PMs and build consensus on the roadmap.
3. Differentiate between what can be internationalized versus localized — Sometimes the same problem across multiple geographies demands different solutions. For example, OTP is a common way of authentication in India, whereas China is a QR code based economy. So, while two country PMs may have the same problem, their approach to solving it may be drastically different and demand separate tech solutions. A global PM’s role is to resolve these conflicts as much as possible, cross-question any such deviations in the solutions which make the core platform complex over the long run. As much as feasible, the global PM endeavors a one size solution, at best minimum deviations. It is a hard problem to defining a general and configurable enough core product such that it can be tailored to the needs of local geographies. Wherever feasible, the global PM works with tech teams to build a lot of country level configurations in the system, so that the core solution remains same, only the configurations wary (called ‘internationalization’). Each geo can then play with its own configuration settings suited to their needs (called ‘localization’). For example, if customers of one country book one-way flights versus another where customers book return flights, the global PM asks the tech to build this as a country level configuration. Language customization has come to become the most internationalized and localized feature today across most global products. Doing something of this sort needs to have the core product configurable such that the texts translations are simple configurations than code changes.
4. Set mechanisms of partnerships across countries — It is said ‘too many cooks spoil the broth’. Often, if a product has users in more than 3 geographies, it not only means a lot of point of views but also people across multiple time zones trying to collaborate, resulting in delays, conflicts and indecisiveness. It is again here that the global PM needs to step in. A global PM sets processes, mechanisms of collaborations and partnerships of the country specific PMs with him as well as with each other. Depending on the scale and life-stage of the product, the democracy versus unilateral decision making follows. A global PM needs to earn enough trust with the country PMs, work within all the constraints to enable an environment of mutual growth and team spirit. He/she needs to be able to push back short-cuts, push the team to consensus, be auto-cratic wherever needed and own global adoption of most features launched (even when they were first launched with a particular geography in mind).

The role of a country specific PM is to build healthy partnerships with other country PMs and global PMs; share data and metrics which can help the global PM in prioritizing the feature (especially if the technology team is shared) and build solutions which solve their country’s problems while being extensible easily to other geographies. In the need for speed in their own country, they must not lose sight of working for a global organization and be cognizant that taking short-cuts may impact the global product over a longer time frame. They may be tempted to not build anything configurable and push the technology team to hard-code stuff for their geography. But doing so will have an impact on other country roll-outs and by spending a little extra effort on the technology side, the benefits and impact of the feature becomes much more significant.

I have actually oversimplified things a little here. Working on this model across multiple time zones and cultures is sometimes taxing. PMs at Amazon deliberate a lot on and write a lot of papers just on this subject. It is as intense as building a developer platform with the clients being PMs of other countries. Because if the objective is to build a global product and to reach a much wider world market, global product management cannot be ignored.Remember, if google was not this country agnostic, it would not be where it is today.