Welcome to “Building Localization from Scratch”, the series where we speak to founding localization leaders about what it really takes to build localization departments from the ground up.
This week’s conversation is with Kevin O’Donnell, Founder of Global10x, a consultancy that helps B2B SaaS companies with go-to-market strategy and operational consulting, and Fractional Head of Growth at Liminary, an AI-powered memory for consultants and strategists. Liminary is still in the pre-localization stage, which means Kevin is working alongside engineers and leadership to shape international go-to-market strategy before translation even begins.
From localization leader to growth strategist
Kevin’s career began at Microsoft, where he led localization project management teams. He worked on major products like MSN and Windows Live, as well as an in-house, cloud-based translation management system (TMS) at a time when third-party solutions couldn’t meet Microsoft’s needs for speed and integration. The system ultimately enabled the company to cycle to a groundbreaking 24/hour, always-on localization model.
Wanting a new direction, Kevin left Microsoft in 2016 and went on to lead the product team at Nitro, a B2B productivity company. From there, he joined Dropbox, where he led their international growth efforts in non-US markets. This involved running experiments across product, marketing and growth and improving the go-to-market experience for Dropbox users around the world.
More recently, as an independent consultant, he’s worked with companies that had already invested in localization, but weren’t seeing the returns they expected.
Discovering the drivers for localization
When Kevin works with companies, he doesn’t start with tools, vendors, or languages. He starts with the why
💡“It’s a deceptively simple question, but companies often just jump into something like this without thinking about it and having any goals. That’s why you end up with problems 12–18 months later when there’s no success criteria around localization and people have to then work backwards to see what success should be.”
Why are you localizing?
Most teams have an immediate answer: “To reach customers who don’t speak English.”
But Kevin pushes further. That answer is rarely specific enough to guide meaningful decisions.
Instead, he uses it as an entry point to dig deeper:
- How does your business acquire customers today?
- Are you product-led or sales-led?
- Do you rely on partners or direct acquisition?
- Which markets are already showing demand signals?
- Where are competitors gaining an advantage?
- Are you planning to build a presence (e.g. sales teams) in new regions?
These questions help teams understand the key business drivers for localization and decide if, where, and when they need to localize.
Start small and experiment
One of Kevin’s strongest recommendations is to resist the urge to go big too early.
💡“Figuring out the why is an important first step because you can sink a lot of money into localization if you have no clear outcome or goals.
Localization can be expensive. Without clear signals, it’s easy to invest heavily in markets that won’t deliver returns.
Instead, he advocates for controlled experimentation.
For example, imagine a B2B company that generates inbound leads through content marketing. If they’re considering expansion into a new market, they don’t need to localize everything upfront.
They can start with a simple test:
- Create a localized landing page,
- Run digital ads in both the source language and the target language,
- Measure conversion differences between the two.
You’re always more likely to see conversion in the local language, but the degree of improvement will help you decide if localizing is worth it in that market.
Kevin acknowledges that early forecasting is difficult, and until you have your data, there’s a lot of guesswork. That’s why success metrics need to be tied to broader business goals.
Localization success doesn’t always mean revenue. It could mean:
- Increased user acquisition.
- Higher engagement.
- Improved customer satisfaction.
- Greater market share.
But if you are focusing on revenue, closely tied metrics like Marketing Qualified Leads and return on effort become critical.
Adjusting performance expectations for new markets
Once a company commits to specific markets, the next challenge is performance expectations. A common mistake is assuming that new markets will perform at the same level as the home market, which is rarely realistic. Instead, Kevin suggests using relative benchmarks
If your base market took years to optimize, new markets will need time too. A reasonable starting point might be targeting 50% of base-market performance across initial markets, then refining expectations as data accumulates
The key is flexibility and adaptability in unfamiliar markets; whether that means adjusting messaging, modifying the product, or rethinking the go-to-market approach entirely.
💡“I think to begin with, forecasting needs to be flexible and dynamic. There’s no point putting rigid targets in there because you don’t know enough about the market. You might need to make some changes to your product to be the best fit.”
Finding signals across the customer journey
Kevin frequently talks about “looking for signals”. These are signs that something in the localization process is working or failing.
To do this effectively, he recommends building dashboards that track the full customer journey:
- Discovery: How users first encounter your product (search, ads, landing pages).
- Engagement: Metrics like bounce rate or time on page.
- Conversion: Actions such as signing up or contacting sales.
- Activation: Whether users actually use the product.
- Retention: Whether they continue using it.
- Advocacy: Reviews, referrals, and recommendations.
At each stage, localized markets can be compared against benchmarks.
For example:
- A high bounce rate on a localized page might indicate poor translation quality or lack of cultural relevance.
- Low conversion rates could point to design issues or unclear value propositions.
- Weak retention might suggest product-market fit challenges.
This step-by-step visibility allows teams to pinpoint where things are breaking down and prioritize fixes accordingly. Kevin acknowledges that this level of analysis can feel overwhelming. The key is to focus on the biggest gaps first rather than trying to fix everything at once.
Making localization a company-wide effort
Very often, localization starts when someone in the marketing team is told they need to translate their website into five European languages, for example. But if the product, support, and sales teams remain source language-only, the customer experience becomes fragmented, and everything else underperforms.
Leads might come in, but they don’t convert. The reverse can also happen if you have a localized product with no localized marketing materials to drive demand.
That’s why Kevin believes localization should be a company-wide priority, driven by executive leadership. When leadership sets the direction, teams across the organization can follow: aligning their priorities from product development to customer support. This is easy to say, but you still need to be realistic. You cannot wait until everybody in the company is ready. Often, there’s a middle ground for reducing risk while still enabling forward momentum:
- Validate market opportunities first.
- Run experiments to confirm potential.
- Then incrementally invest in localization across teams.
Attributing value to content
Another critical aspect of localization strategy is deciding where to invest.
Kevin uses the type of content as a guide:
- Highest-impact content (e.g. marketing campaigns and landing pages) should be human written, premium localization.
- Mid-tier content (e.g. product UI) might be suited to AI localization combined with a human review to avoid critical mistakes.
- Less visible content (e.g. reference materials and developer documentation) can be lower priority. In this case, AI is a good way to scale content at a very low cost.
This tiered approach ensures that resources are focused where they matter most, without overspending on content that has minimal business impact.
Build vs. buy: Lessons learned
Having built a TMS earlier in his career, Kevin has a clear stance today: most companies should buy, not build. This is mainly because modern localization tools are far more advanced than they were 15 years ago.
Building a custom solution only makes sense if there’s a genuine need that off-the-shelf solutions can’t address. For most companies, if building software is not your specialty, you’re not going to be able to build the best in-class solution. Why not use the industry’s best that’s already there?
And if you do have engineering teams to hand? You’re still going to be diverting their time from core product development and creating ongoing maintenance and support requirements, at the risk of reinventing solutions that already exist.
It can be very tempting to just hook up an API to AI and have everything localized by tomorrow. That doesn’t take into account translation memories, style guides, and quality assurance. Without these, quality suffers, and fixing it later is often more expensive than doing it right from the start.
Measure, focus, and scale with intent
Localization is often framed as a technical or linguistic challenge. In reality, it’s a strategic discipline that touches every part of a business.
Kevin’s approach follows a clear pattern:
- Start by defining why you’re localizing. Without that clarity, even the best execution won’t deliver meaningful results.
- Test markets before committing. Small, well-designed experiments can reveal more than large upfront investments.
- Measure everything across the customer journey. Localization doesn’t fail all at once; it breaks at specific points. The signals are there if you look for them.
- Align teams, but don’t wait for perfection. Progress comes from coordinated steps, not all-at-once transformations.
- Be deliberate about where you invest. Not all content and markets deserve equal attention.
Localization only works when it’s tied to real business outcomes. If you know why you’re doing it, test before you scale, and follow the signals across the customer journey, it becomes a lever for growth. If you don’t, it quickly turns into activity without impact.
This interview is the sixth in our “Building Localization from Scratch” series, where we sit down with 10 localization industry leaders to pull back the curtain on what it actually takes to build a localization department from the ground up.
Every hard-won lesson, workflow, and strategy from the series is distilled into our White Paper: The Blueprint for Founding Localization Managers, a practical guide for localization leaders building their function from the ground up.
📢The White Paper launches in June 2026. Register your interest here, and we’ll send it straight to your inbox when it’s ready!