Driving Early Adoption for Lokalise’s Shopify Translation App

The Client: Lokalise

Lokalise is a SaaS company specializing in translation and localization management. Founded in 2017, Lokalise provides a cloud-based platform that allows companies to automate, manage, and translate their digital content, such as mobile apps, websites, games, and software. It primarily serves tech-driven teams and offers a robust set of tools for agile localization workflows. Lokalise supports various integrations with tools like Figma and GitHub, and its solutions are utilized by teams across design, development, and project management.

Lokalise operates in a B2B (Business-to-Business) model, catering to organizations looking to expand their digital products internationally by ensuring content is localized for different markets. Their clients range from startups to Fortune 500 companies, including names like Revolut, Amazon, and Yelp. The company has grown rapidly, currently serving over 3,000 customers globally. The company has raised a total of $67.7 million in funding, including a $50M Series B round in 2021.

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The Mission: Interim Product Manager

In a pivotal phase of its product development journey, Lokalise needed an interim Product Manager to cover for parental leave and drive progress on its new Shopify app, Flow, aimed at enabling seamless translation of store content into multiple languages.

We joined a cross-functional squad focused on enabling Shopify merchants to import their store content into a translation workflow and export the translated content back into their stores. The squad faced significant challenges, including managing the technical complexities of integrating Shopify content while ensuring the import and export processes maintained data completeness and integrity. Catering to stores of varying sizes and complexities, including those with extensive custom setups, required a strong focus on stability and resilience to handle diverse use cases effectively. With the app in its early phases, aligning on feedback from early adopters and prioritizing features demanded focused efforts and close cross-team collaboration, particularly to balance competing priorities across multiple squads.

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Our Main Quest: Empower Early Adopters and Lay the Foundation for a Successful Soft Launch

This engagement required an interim PM who could not only fill the temporary gap but also bring clarity and momentum to critical initiatives. The role involved processing feedback from early adopters, identifying areas for improvement, complementing the ongoing discovery work conducted by other PMs, and continuously improving the apps’ stability and readiness for soft launch.

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Launch: Onboarded Very Fast

Within the first week, a comprehensive handover was completed with the outgoing PM, including a review of the app’s current state and workflow. Preparations began for early adopters, and efforts were made to quickly familiarize ourselves with the squad’s rituals and broader organizational processes. The squad we joined included 2 Frontend Engineers, 4 Backend engineers, a Senior Engineering Manager, a Lead Product Designer, and a Senior UX researcher. To build rapport, we set up coffee chats to introduce ourselves, understand team dynamics, and establish connections. Additionally, meetings were held with other PMs, EMs, Designers, PMM, and other key stakeholders to align on goals and uncover opportunities for collaboration and improvement.

First Deliverables and Results

In the initial weeks, the following deliverables were achieved to build momentum and establish a clear direction for the squad:

1. Researching Language Assignment to Markets: Conducted an in-depth analysis of how translations should be assigned to markets, a critical step for ensuring translated content appears in merchants’ stores. Collaborated with the designer and engineer to align on the behavior, address open questions, and refine the ticket for development.
2. Roadmap Workstream Planning: Partnered with the Engineering Manager to split the roadmap into distinct workstreams, enabling better sprint planning and goal tracking. This approach distinguished between discovery and delivery tasks, highlighting areas requiring research before engineering refinement and clarifying the type of research needed.

3. App Testing and Design Papercut Review: Conducted thorough testing of the app to identify design papercuts impacting usability, ensuring that even in its early phase, the app maintained a balance between functionality and user experience. Collaborated with PMs, EMs, and designers across squads to categorize these issues and assign them to the appropriate squads for resolution, prioritizing a smooth and frustration-free experience for early adopters without compromising long-term goals.

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Explore and Conquer: Solved for the Client

Initiative 1 - Building Stability and Aligning Priorities for Early Adopters

Problem:

• At this stage of the product, the squad’s scope required a more granular focus to ensure resilience and stability for handling early adopters. This included improving critical workflows like import and export processes while simultaneously supporting additional feature development. Balancing these efforts, alongside customer feedback and cross-squad dependencies, required clear prioritization and structured weekly sprint planning.

What has been done:

Aside from existing rituals for aligning with PMs and other leads, fostering regular collaboration.

• The roadmap was refined to focus on improving the stability and resilience of import and export, ensuring the app could handle early adopters’ demands without compromising performance. This involved identifying and addressing key bottlenecks and iteratively improving these processes to deliver a smoother experience for merchants.
• Customer feedback was regularly incorporated into sprint planning, allowing the squad to adjust priorities and make targeted improvements to workflows and features.
• To document all discussions and decisions, product briefs were created in collaboration with the squad. These served as a single source of truth for each initiative, capturing the problem, potential solutions, technical considerations, and agreed-upon next steps. This ensured transparency and alignment across the team and stakeholders.

This systematic approach ensured the squad could balance resilience-focused efforts with ongoing feature development, maintaining the agility needed to support early adopters while preparing for broader adoption.

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Initiative 2 - Strategic Planning for Q4 Initiatives

Problem:

• The squad’s focus for Q4 revolved around achieving 100% translation coverage, a critical milestone that required detailed planning and coordination. However, this effort needed to account for other parallel initiatives, balancing resources and maintaining progress across multiple priorities.

What has been done:

• Introduced a discovery board to provide a structured approach to addressing Q4 priorities, including but not limited to 100% translation coverage.

• Collaborated with UXR and Design to group problems and opportunities into validated or invalidated, depending on the evidence and used this categorization to guide discussions and focus efforts on high-priority areas.
• Brought in Engineering and evaluated potential solutions through an impact/ease matrix to prioritize feasible and high-impact options.
• Facilitated a solution exploration session for the main opportunity to tackle 100% Translation Coverage, engaging the entire squad to discuss.
• Competitor research and internal technical insights shared by engineers.
• High-level solution mapping, co-created with the designer, to outline steps for achieving full translation coverage.
• Did assumption mapping to identify what needed to be true for solutions to work. This clarified the riskiest assumptions and informed the next steps for testing feasibility, desirability, usability, and viability.

This structured discovery process provided a clear direction, enabling the squad to focus on testing critical assumptions and making informed decisions for 100% translation.

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Discovery Mini-Missions: Our Side Quests

1. Researching How to Handle Metafields for Import/Export: Conducted an in-depth analysis of Shopify metafields, focusing on their value types (e.g., string, number) and whether they are translatable. The research explored technical constraints, such as handling different data formats and integration challenges, and included competitor benchmarking to evaluate how similar features are implemented. This effort resulted in a prioritized list of metafield types to focus on, along with considerations for integration and improved user experience.

📚 Metafields: In Shopify, these are customizable fields that allow merchants to store additional data about products, collections, or other resources beyond Shopify’s default settings. They enable flexibility for unique use cases, such as adding detailed product specifications or custom attributes that can enhance store functionality and integrations.

2. Organization-Wide Prioritization Support: Led the creation of a centralized “priorities of priorities” document to streamline alignment across all squads. This initiative consolidated hypotheses on problems to solve, defined scope and dependencies, and detailed key information such as associated Jira issues, accountable owners, owning squads, current status, and ICE (Impact, Confidence, Effort) scores. By providing cross-squad visibility and clarity, the document facilitated better coordination and decision-making, ensuring squads were aligned and well-prepared for the next batch of early adopters.

3. Customer Interviews and Incident Support: Participated in customer interviews to gather qualitative insights into user pain points and document use cases. This research informed relevant product briefs, shaping the next steps and ensuring alignment with user needs. Additionally, provided quick feedback to the squad to prioritize and resolve only the most critical issues that blocked early adopters, ensuring faster resolution where necessary while incorporating broader findings into subsequent iterations and roadmap decisions.

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Mission Achievements: Delivered Outcomes

💡 Enabled Onboarding for the First Two Batches of Early Adopters During the Pre-Soft Launch Pilot: Improved the app’s stability and defined key features based on feedback from 53 early adopters, ensuring a smoother experience for the next wave of users.

💡 Discovery Framework for 100% Translation: Introduced and facilitated a discovery board that enabled the squad to systematically address critical problems and test the riskiest assumptions with clear direction. This surfaced assumptions from multiple perspectives, fostering collaboration across Product, Design, UXR, and Engineering to co-create and refine solutions.

💡 Reduced AI Translation Costs and Enhanced Merchant Experience: Drove the deduplication initiative, reducing import time, duplicate entries, and unnecessary translation requests, which lowered operational costs tied to AI translation services.