By Stacey Weber
Whenever I travel outside the U.S., I am struck by the number of people who speak multiple languages fluently. On one particular trip, I was in the Brussels airport. The ticket counter agent was speaking at least 4 languages – and she knew them so well that she could quickly switch between them. She’d get someone checked in using French, then turn around and answer a quick question in German. She spoke to me in near perfect English, and as I was walking away I heard her speaking Spanish (or perhaps Portuguese) to another passenger.
For awhile, I would kind of beat myself up over this — my Spanish is pretty rusty, and I would definitely not say I’m fluent. I often wish I knew at least one other language – it’s so much more personal to greet people in their native tongue, rather than expecting the whole world to speak English.
Why not learn Dutch?
Before Covid, I was living in Amsterdam and training product managers and product marketing managers across Europe. The plan was to spend about 3 months at a time there, living on a houseboat and figuring out whether I should move there full-time. I thought I loved the city, and I figured that longer stays would help me figure out whether I was really in love, or if it was just infatuation. It’s pretty straight-forward to move there, under the Dutch-American Friendship Treaty – but to become a citizen, you have to pass a language exam.
A few weeks into my first 3-month stay, I signed up for an accelerate Dutch class designed for ex-pats. For six grueling weeks, I joined a small group who spoke exclusively Dutch. Each week, we’d study a sentence structure or verb conjugation – and in the next class, we practiced under the careful tutelage of a native Dutch speaker.
This was one of the hardest things I’ve ever attempted to learn. I walked around for weeks practicing sounds I had never taught my throat to make. It was difficult, but I did all the homework, practiced with Dutch friends, and thought I was making good progress.
At the end of the class, the group decided to meet for a few beers and dinner. I was one of the last to arrive at the meeting spot — a cool little taco place in the Jordaan. I took a seat at the table, casually commenting on our achievement – and everyone became very quiet. Their mouths sort of dropped open, until one brave group member (who happens to be a product manager also!) explained that they didn’t think I was very smart. They had decided I must be “like, a bar owner or something”, and they were astounded to hear me speaking intelligent English. Apparently, my progress was not as good as I had thought!
Stop beating yourself up!
So, I still haven’t picked up that second language – but somewhere along the way, I decided I was being too hard on myself. After all, don’t we Product Managers translate constantly for our organizations? I may not know Dutch, German, Chinese, Flemish, or Hindi – but I do understand Sales-speak, Development-dialect, Promotions-patois, and Operations-oracy.
We do translations all the time. Top performing product professionals, whether they’re product managers, product owners, product marketing managers, or any of the other thousand titles associated with this job – achieve success by becoming very skilled at understanding each member of the team, so they can translate for others.
When Sales says “If I could only get this feature in the release, I’d close this deal,” they actually mean, “I feel like I’m losing here, and surely it cannot be my fault.” The Product Manager’s job is to help the team understand, and to keep them focused on their current work. If a Salesperson makes a statement like that directly to development, without any translation, the team might believe the rhetoric and quickly switch to satisfying one salesperson. The Product Manager needs to help everyone see the market clearly and objectively.
When Development says, “we’re delivering a new architectural layer that will dynamically expose all data elements”, the Product Marketing Manager needs to intercept! The promotions team MUST understand the benefits of the release, rather than the technological miracle that happens under the covers – or the marketing budget will be wasted on a message that misses the target.
The biggest battle in doing this translation is to give ourselves a moment to think. Where did the statement come from, and who else needs to understand it? Think about the Development explanation from above – they are speaking from their very technical viewpoint. Promotions, however, needs to understand the benefit to the buyer and/or user.
With experience, you gain efficiency in translating!
Early on in my career, I did a lot of this translation on the fly. Later, I learned that much of this translation can be ‘canned’, by anticipating the needs of each department and communicating to them so that their primary concerns are placed front and center. In the case of Promotions, positioning is the preferred method of translation – we use positioning to move us away from the technical, into laser-focus on the market’s problems and our solutions to those problems. We can do that translation up front, so the Promotions team can continue to focus on the benefit, without getting distracted by Development details. The secondary benefit is that we don’t have to spend quite as much time being personally involved in reviewing early versions of the promotional artifacts. In fact, with a good positioning statement, MarCom is free to operate independently – creating high impact promotions with minimal daily involvement by the Product Marketing Manager.
We translate for our teams every day. When we focus on that necessity, we can do some of the work up front and ensure that each member has what they need to excel at their particular job. When everyone understands their role, the team can continue to create, market, and sell current products effectively…while product people return to the market, analyzing its problems and prioritizing requirements for the next big thing.
