Localization, product, & engineering: the Zendesk approach

Zendesk is a cloud-based application designed to improve communication between companies and their customers. For our global team and customers, how we connect and communicate matters most.

Ketty Tirrito is a Localization Team Lead at Zendesk with 8+ years of experience in the language industry across both vendor and buyer-side roles. She drives product localization strategy and operations with expertise in translation technology, vendor management, and linguistic asset management.

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Published May 24, 2022·8 min read

Globalization at Zendesk

Zendesk’s Globalization department is made up of two teams: the internationalization team, which is the engineering side, and the localization team, which is responsible for delivering localized content. The two work in tandem to invest in scalability, flexibility, and automation to serve customers’ international needs.

Our 24-person globalization team is located across four continents, five countries, and 10 different time zones. We speak over 12 languages collectively.

The internationalization team was created in 2012, and by 2017 it grew beyond the U.S. in order to foster better collaborations with multiple local engineering teams.

In 2017 we created a new localization team under the program management team, while internationalization remained part of the engineering team. Our engineers build and maintain the software and infrastructure that powers our customer-facing products. We have over 1,400 engineers in eight countries.

In 2019, the localization team moved to the product management department. This allowed the team even more visibility of our products’ life cycle.

In 2020, the localization and internationalization teams joined forces to become the globalization team we have today.

What are the biggest localization challenges?

Localization awareness

Why does localization matter? Localization awareness is a constant challenge. Usually localization is de-prioritized while engineering teams work on other higher priority features.

Team growth and priorities

As our company and product demand both grow, we have a lot of new engineering teams. While it’s exciting, of course, that also means varying levels of understanding for our best practices or localization workflows across teams.

More engineers means developing more products and features at a quicker pace, and it’s difficult for us to scale up to support all of them. Sometimes we aren’t able to engage with those teams before new features are released. Some products have more issues than others, which impacts our product globalization prospects.

There are also different project management approaches or deployment schedules throughout various teams. Some product teams have shorter, two-week sprint cycles, but others might have four-week sprint cycles. This can make it difficult for our localization teams to support everyone’s schedules and needs.

There are other constraints, such as strings being hard coded and not externalized, and other layout issues as well.

How to find localization success

Engage upper management and teams

It's extremely important to have our upper management team really engaged with us right from the start of product development. That way, we can identify where the globalization team can support optimizing localized content. We use data to guide these conversations: how many customers are using the products in languages that are not English? What revenue is generated from non-English speaking customers?

Aiming to unify teams from the get-go, our globalization team helps onboard new engineers. This helps the new hires quickly understand how our collaborations will work.

Additionally, we produce a bi-annual localization globalization newsletter that provides team updates, achievements, and insights. This helps remind key stakeholders of our mission, strategy, and goals so that it’s always top of mind.

Conquer design and translation issues

We involve the internationalization team to solve any complex design challenges. For example, one of our products involved multiple languages and integrations, so we needed support for design and development.

Given we have a geo-distributed team, we need to create consistent workflows. Documentation is essential to our team because we need a point of reference that can be shared across the teams. We try to document everything targeting product engineering design teams and for ourselves. We also have dedicated communication channels with language experts who are directly available to help.

We regularly check strings for any source context or localizability issues that might impact translations. For example, placeholders need to have clear names to provide enough context to the translators. We control churn by identifying potential hiccups before sending them to the translators.

Lastly, we do another round of regression testing before releasing the product.

Key takeaways

1. Engage key stakeholders as early as possible.
   Start the localization process early. Utilize data to help upper managers understand why localization matters and explain best practices.

2. Provide team support.
   Support any teams that need guidance on localization. Participate in onboarding engineers and explaining how you’ll collaborate across teams.

3. Create clear priorities for your localization team.
   The localization team must ensure best practices are upheld at each stage of a project. Identify the most critical points where the localization team should jump in and review progress.

4. Invest in relationships.
   By working closely with the engineering team at Zendesk, we’ve found that successful localization is rooted in great relationships. Those connections are the most crucial investments.