My iPhone showed me a memory the other day — a photo of Copenhagen streets from a few years ago.
I was there for a presales engineering training after Monsido joined the Acquia family. During the program, I got to meet the product team face to face — and I couldn’t help asking: “Can we add Japanese? You already support English, Danish, French…” That spontaneous pitch set everything in motion.
When you sell a foreign product in Japan, people assume the hard part is translation.
It is hard. But translation is only a fraction of the job.
Take demo scenarios, for example. The ones from headquarters are built around role-playing and storytelling — “You’re Sarah, a marketing manager. Today you’re launching a campaign.” That works perfectly in English. In front of Japanese customers, it falls flat.
What Japanese customers want to hear isn’t a story. They want to know: “How does this apply to us?”
You have to rebuild the narrative around real use cases. “For a company like yours, here’s how this would work.” Only then does the product’s value land.
And here’s the thing — if even a single line of English text remains on the demo screen, you’ll hear: “This is a product for overseas markets, isn’t it?” One sentence, and everything you’ve explained gets reset. No matter how many times it happens, it stings.
Early in my career at Acquia, I built a presentation for a major enterprise client — five slides walking through a product’s implementation steps, like a storyboard. I thought it was thorough. My senior colleague took one look and said: “You can fit this on one page.”
Japanese customers want the full picture at a glance. A single-page overview that shows the entire flow beats five carefully sequenced slides. When I rebuilt those five pages into one bird’s-eye view, it clicked: this isn’t translation — this is reconstruction.
When materials don’t exist, you build them from scratch. I once went through every single feature in a product’s admin panel and created a comprehensive feature list — something that, oddly enough, not even the global team had. When I translated that document into English and shared it back, headquarters loved it.
Localization, exported in reverse.
Back to Copenhagen.
After the training, my pitch had worked — it was time to seriously tackle the Japanese UI for Monsido. Honestly, I considered doing it all myself. But I decided to ask the entire Japan team for help.
Everyone raised their hand.
I’m glad I didn’t try to do it alone. The translation quality improved, sure — but more importantly, the whole team developed a sense of ownership over the product. That mattered far more than any individual contribution I could have made.
My very first demo was a disaster. The appointment came in the day before. I scrambled to prepare, but the environment wouldn’t work. An American colleague stayed up late to help me fix it. The next morning? The internet went down at the venue. The demo never happened.
I once sat on the floor of a corridor in Osaka Station, writing a proposal on my laptop because there was nowhere else to work. We lost that deal, too.
Through all of that, I learned one thing above all else.
It wasn’t “always have a recording ready as backup” — though yes, I started doing that too. It was this: if it doesn’t exist, build it. Don’t skip the small effort of drawing a quick diagram. Sweat the details.
When someone at a seminar or webinar says “Can I get a copy of those materials?” — that’s one of the best feelings in this job. Something I put real effort into, being used again and again in different contexts. One piece of material creating value in places I never expected.
That kind of impact doesn’t come from translation. It comes from making a product yours — from re-delivering it, culture and all.
Looking at that Copenhagen photo on my phone, I found myself remembering all of this.