For many product teams, going global is both exciting and daunting. Often, the plan is to just translate a product that works within a particular market and optimistically expect positive results in other markets.
But a truly global product should be designed to evolve from the start. The leader must understand diverse cultures, user behaviours, and local setups. To build for a global audience, it’s important to understand the world as a collection of individual demands and desires, not just one big market.
This takes a clever approach that goes beyond the surface-level attributes to understand the real cultural and pragmatic contexts. INIMFON BASSEY, a senior product manager, is great at designing for global reach and cultural fit.
She understands that simply because a product is successful within a specific region doesn’t guarantee it will, anywhere else. She guides her teams to develop products with a globally-minded approach, so they can grow across borders without losing their relevance to local users.
An essential component of her strategy is building global-first products. This means digging deeper than just localization to really understand the cultural context. It means designing a user experience (UX) capable of accommodating different reading styles, visuals, and cultural norms.
Inimfon understands that simply because a product is successful within a specific region doesn’t guarantee it will, anywhere else. She guides her teams to develop products with a globally-minded approach, so they can grow across borders without losing their relevance to local users.
Inimfon also focuses on localizing important things like payments, recognizing that a credit card system might not work in a country where people prefer mobile payments or paying when the item is delivered.
Her teams focus on a flexible structure that allows them to swiftly incorporate local payment options along with additional features without needing to rebuild from scratch.
Inimfon’s global plan also focuses on finding and using scaling points in different areas. These are the moments when a product either takes off or fails in a new market. By watching how quickly early users adopt the product, she can see these points and decide whether to invest more or change the local plan.
For example, a mobile product might go viral in a place where everyone has smartphones and fast internet, but struggles where the internet is not reliable. Being able to spot these points allows for a more flexible and data-based global launch.
To make these calls, she uses product analytics to change adoption plans for global growth. She doesn’t think one plan works for everyone. Instead, she uses analytics to get a close look at how users act in each area.
An essential component of Inimfon’s strategy is building global-first products. This means digging deeper than just localization to really understand the cultural context.
This information helps her understand what users do, which features are popular, and how to adjust marketing to fit local values. By using these insights, she can make a product that feels like a local solution rather than something brought in from another country.
For example, Inimfon once worked on a social product that did great in a culture of public sharing. But when it first came out in an area that values privacy and close communities, it didn’t do well. Using analytics, she saw that people weren’t using the sharing features.
So, she had her team change the product’s UX to make private group sharing the default and easier to find, which led to many more users. This shows how she uses data to make a product fit its cultural settings, proving that a global-first mindset comes from real understanding.
Inimfon Bassey shows that designing for global growth is a smart skill. She has gone past just translating, and she now understands the complex parts of cultural adaptation and market-specific plans. Her skill in mixing global growth with local relevance makes sure that her products are not just seen by people everywhere, but truly loved by them.
