With Petra Mesic, Teamhead Copy and Localization at Puma

Below is an automated transcript of this episode

Antoine Rey  (Host) 0:17
Hi, my name is Antoine Rey and I’ll be your host today for this Global Ambitions Podcast episode. And today my guest is Petra Mesic, who’s the Teamhead of copy and localization at Puma.
And today we’ll be talking about how to address high workload in a localization team and your team optimization. Petra, welcome to the programme. 

Petra Mesic (Guest) 0:37
Hi, Antoine. Nice to meet you and thank you for having me in the this podcast episode.

Antoine  0:42
I think I’ll I’ll jump straight into it. Petra, I think you have a syndrome that I see in a lot of localization managers in your situation is there’s always more work than there are people in, in the team and within the organisation.
So hw do you end up? You know, like you doing everything or delegating? Like, how do you work with your team in that case? 

Petra   1:02
Yes, you’re right. I mean, I think I’m in a similar spot, like everyone else in the industry where we have unlimited content with limited resources. Just to to give a bit more context, I manage an internal team of copywriters in the copy and localization team here at Puma in the team of Global e-commerce, and we deal with a lot of products. We write copies for two seasons, so autumn, winter and spring summer, and we have thousands of products which need English copies and then translations. 

Usually, we get products in advance, but for most of them we miss some information and you know that if we want to write good copies, we need enough data to write good copy. And this is where the whole struggle comes from, and then with the limited team it becomes really hard to navigate and what I noticed recently is that we are approaching every copy with with the same care, which I mean it’s great but with the high workload it it’s not a good solution because we will write copies for like a cheaper product with the same quality as like an important collaboration, So lately my team and I, we’ve been looking into how to optimise this workload because we want to write and do things in the team in a smarter way and not just to be productive. So this balance between productivity and doing things in a smart, smarter way is still something that we are trying to figure out. 

Antoine  2:42
Yeah, I was going to ask the related question I guess is like who gets the most attention? Like is it the stakeholder that screams the lattice or is that driven by a set of KPIs such as revenue or?

Petra  2:53
I would love to go into the direction of having KPIs decide to what gets most attention. So far it was mostly the the first option who screams the the loudest because we are dealing with many different stakeholders within our companies. We are a global team serving different Puma markets so-called regions.
And so far, we treated all the regions in the same way. We have now some more guidance from upper management in how to approach the regions, but yes, so far we were doing everything in the same way which was not very good then for for the planning of the seasons. 

Antoine  3:35
And so going forward, you’re looking at geographic zones that you prioritise or is it driven by specific markets?

Petra  3:43
It’s driven by the specific markets with the highest revenue and with the highest impact. We didn’t look into that much of impact in the beginning but now what we are trying to do to really look the highest revenue markets and also to see what will be the best for the customer because so far we were struggling with what’s most important for the internal stakeholders and what’s also important for our end users. So this balance between balance between external and internal stakeholders, so to say is still very challenging for us, but I believe with having more guidance from upper management, we will tackle this problem very soon and we will. We will start really focusing our time on having high quality copies where it matters.

Antoine  4:34
And that seems like a better approach than whoever screams the loudest before that.

Petra   4:38
Exactly, exactly. We are really, you know, getting away from that. Maybe by some stakeholders we are seen as a blocker because we say no to things now more often. But it’s really to see what makes more impact at the end of the day because we can write a very good copy for a water bottle. But we believe that more impact will be if we dedicate our time to write a really, really good copy for a really good running shoes that Puma released recently.

Antoine   5:10
And beyond markets like a geographic zone, there must be some strategic product offering that you want to highlight , in a given month, for instance, that will take precedence as well, I presume, or specific campaigns for such products?

Petra   5:23
Exactly so, so far in my team, we are dealing with product copy. We often get also approved copies from our marketing teams from different business units and we always incorporate them into our product copy, but we want to even go one step further and really dedicate our time into refining those copies because for writing our copies, because we have really high word count of those copies we use AI tools and as we all know, AI is as good as the data you get. And it’s only useful if you post edit and you continuously work on those AI copies. So we want to really be a middle point between AI, between marketing teams, between the users and really provide high quality copies and translations. 

Antoine  6:15
That’s great. You’re already using AI in a production environment to create copy?

Petra   6:20
Exactly.  That’s for our English source, of course for the translations, we use machine translation. I for example set up different profiles, different empty plugins for different languages together, not only with my internal team but also with freelancers, because we only cover in House languages such as French, Spanish, German and English. But we work with many more languages. For those languages, I always ask our freelancers, OK, in your experience, what would be the best machine translation plug in? And then I apply those, set up those profiles in our TMS. 

Antoine   6:57
And it seems like many of the listeners here, I would say you never have enough resources in your team for the ask like what your company expects and to your point earlier on, sometimes when you have to refuse a job or something like that based on strategic priorities, I’m sure then  you’ve been seen as the blocker.  How do you then internally create like self kind of a marketing and position yourself as a revenue contributor rather than a translation centre, I guess?

Petra   7:28
Yeah, we are still in that process moving away from being a cost centre to towards revenue generator because when I started the focus was more on getting a TMS, saving costs which we managed to do year over year. But what we are trying to do now to really be seen  by ourselves and by other teams as a revenue generate. It all starts with ourselves.   
So we what we’ve been doing, we would create so-called self marketing presentations and we would present to different regions about our work, how we deployed AI in our team, how AI helps us get more consistent and translations and copies and also faster copies and translations.
And we also started sharing our tools with the regions, so we are providing them with guidance. So for example there is one team in the in North America.   
We don’t provide usually copies for them, but they were interested in deploying AI for for their content, so we help them on board them and guide them through the whole process of adopting AI. So we want to be seen not only as a revenue generator but also as a consulting team.

Antoine  8:45
And that makes a lot of sense. And like who do you target then? Like as part of your sphere of influence, the people that you wanted to present that self marketing to? 

Petra   8:53
So we first go to the stakeholders that we mostly work with. So these are regional content managers but we also started sharing our findings with other marketing teams with upper management. For example, our AI tool has reached sea level in the company and it was really pushed by them.
So yeah, I think we, as I said, we started having more influence in the company, but it’s still a long way to go. I would still like us to be more data-driven and to really, you know, prioritise markets based on numbers, not only because the upper management says, but because we see the data and we do have access to data, but we still need to learn to read them.

Antoine  9:44
And so you making my job very easy then to follow up on the question on the data side. Like, I always find that a lot of localization manager in your position, they want to have someone to look after the TMS on the tech side, they want to have a PM, they want to have quality people, but sometimes an analyst comes as a second thought, right? A data analyst. Is that something that you’ve been thinking about that you’re looking at as well?

Petra   10:10
Yes, I mean it would be great to have a data analyst in the team and we do have a data analytics team that we collaborate with but we need someone that would be like a bridge between the two teams, and I saw recently that one of my team members really has aspirations to go more into this analytics role so I set a goal for him to actually create a dashboard with our KPIs to look more into other markets and he  did it perfectly well and he I think he felt much happier contributing to the team in that manner because the copywriters, you know, they write copies, they collaborate with different teams, check the legally approved terms, but they also show other talents and I think it’s up to us, team heads and heads of localization to really see what different talents and aspirations your team member have and then give them freedom to explore that because I think everyone would be surprised with how much more insight you get as a team if you expand the roles of your team members. 

Antoine  11:23
Well, that’s a very clever way of looking at it and maybe sometimes lucky to have someone who has an aspiration or an ability to fulfill that role within your team. But when you’re struggling with resources, I think everybody experienced that where it’s very difficult to go and borrow at the time of an external data analyst or an external developer or engineer you know to help you develop your tools there. So if you can repurpose someone from your existing team there into that role and extend his or her hours again even more than they are, but that’s a very good use of their time there. And so do you use like some of your team members as well for same thing with prompt and generating or AI research at the moment I guess that’s what everybody is looking for. 

Petra   12:12
Yeah, definitely. So as I said, we are a content team. We are a team of copywriters. But my copywriters don’t just write copies and you know, they don’t spend days thinking of, would this word be the best in this context? No. Most of them work on improving our AI tool that we are working with. They even tell me. Oh, I see. AI is tired now. Oh, I see they are using non approved terms, so they are really quick to grasp these things that AI sometimes produces that yeah, they are basically prompt engineers, although they are still officially copywriters. 

And also one of my team members that used to be a German copywriter. I saw she has an incredible talent for project management and she’s been helping me a lot with localization project management. So she moved away more from the copywriting role into project management role. I think having you know people that are employed to be copywriters. But also if they have other talents and and they express also a wish to to develop further who am I to say no, I’m more than happy to to open their horizons to help them evolve more into in the project management role or into technical project management role. I think the yeah, there’s an endless possibilities even in the content team.

Antoine   13:37
Great use of like multitasking I guess for those people and wearing and different hats there. But here in this case,  you know, because there’s a lot of startup and scale-ups managers that listen to this podcast and it’s good to see that it’s even happening at a very large corporate like a Puma in this case where you do have to wear multiple hats and you do have to get your hands dirty and achieve a number of things yourself.

Petra   14:02
Yes, Puma is a big company, but there is still a lot of growth that needs to happen in certain areas. And our team is one of them. We use AI but for example, in the localization maturity level, we are not that advanced, maybe as other teams b ecause we have to wear multiple hats, but I believe that’s also one of the reasons we grew into our role so much in such a short time.

Antoine  14:32
Well, listen, thanks very much for sharing those insights with us. The on the podcast and we certainly wish you every continued success there with the team there and lovely to speak with you today, Petra. 

Petra   14:45
Thank you so much, Antoine and have a great day.  

Petra Mesic

Teamhead Copy and Localization

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