Go Global with Your Product
by Twilio Head of Product
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Go Global 🌏
with Your Product
Christine Siu

👋 Intro
Current
- Lead Twilio’s International Product team
Previous
- Led teams to expand into and across APAC; both in 0-1
startup and mature state enterprise settings
Specialism
- B2B, enterprise SaaS, regulated industries 🏦☎

Spot the difference 👀🍫
Vs
Values per 100g
Energy 2232 Kj 2250 Kj
Fat/ Sat’d 30g/ 18g 30.4g/ 19.2g
Carb/ Sugars 57g/ 56g 57.3g/ 56g
Protein 7.3g 7.6g
Salt 0.14g 82mg
Fibre 2.1g -

Cadbury Dairy Milk Battle 🤼
󰏅UK version 󰎉AU version
Product info Our classic bar of deliciously creamy
Cadbury Dairy Milk milk chocolate, made
with fresh milk from the British Isles and
Ireland. A mouthful of “mmmm” in every
piece!
Cadbury Dairy Milk Chocolate bar has a
smooth and creamy chocolatey goodness
and is made from 100% sustainably
sourced cocoa.
Proudly made in Tasmania, from imported
and local ingredients.
Size 45g 75g
Ingredients MILK SOLIDS 20% MINIMUM, ACTUAL 23%.
COCOA SOLIDS 20% MINIMUM. CONTAINS
VEGETABLE FATS IN ADDITION TO COCOA
BUTTER.
FULL CREAM MILK, SUGAR, COCOA BUTTER,
COCOA MASS, MILK SOLIDS, EMULSIFIERS
(SOY LECITHIN, 476), FLAVOURS.
MILK CHOCOLATE CONTAINS COCOA SOLIDS
27%, MILK SOLIDS MINIMUM 24%.

Why expand internationally?

󰫿󰘆󰳆 Customers elsewhere have a similar/
same problem to solve and that your product
value proposition resonates ❤ with them.

A GTM-first approach 💰

🤔 What if you wait?

First 🚀 → then ✈ → followed by 🚁

So what have I learnt?

Play it like a team sport

Strategic alignment & evangelism
- Map out decision makers, sponsors,
stakeholders
- Clarity ownership & articulate vision 👁
- Argue & measure with data
- Strategic: TAM/ Revenue vs Effort → Country
priority list
- Feature gaps: Deal win/loss ratio & reasons;
conversion metrics, NPS, CSAT
- Build empathy 🏾🏾 by storytelling
- Japan 󰏦 sign up flow customer journey map
- Customer verbatims from research
Context
- Company size: Enterprise
- Product: Mature, portfolio with
dependencies
- GTM: Boots 🥾 on the ground
Example: Twilio GTM & Core Product teams
Operations/ processes
- Communicate & collaborate
- Dependency management 󰜍

Go deep 🔬 first, wide later

Context
- 🌱 Growth focus → Top of funnel optimisation
- General perception was that our international onboarding was 😒
Discovery deep dive 🤿
- Identify north star metric 🎯: Product Activation
- Synthesise qualitative feedback
- Competitive benchmarking
- JTBD - how customers are not/ under-served 💔
- Hypotheses & testing 🧪
Example: Twilio self-service onboarding
Ruthlessly ⚡ prioritise
- If we can’t even fix the UK, we
can forget the rest.
- Focus on what truly makes a
difference to your customers

Speed 🚀 vs scale 🚅

Limited runway → Optimise for ARR 💵
- Brute force
- 2 net new locales
- Co-wrote UX copy ✍ with prospect
Context
- Company size: 30
- Product & GTM: 0-1 phase
Example: Localisation at 0-1 startup 󰘲
Takeaway
- Do the things that don’t scale, delight 🤩 your customers instead.

Context
- Target locales: 5+
- Product web assets: Diverse tech stack - organic & through acquisitions
(integration is hard!) → Prohibitively expensive & inefficient to meet everyone where
they were
Approach: Centralise & platformise ⤴
- Standardise internationalisation
- Enable teams to be self-sufficient
- 🤖 Automate localisation
Result
- High quality, consistent localised
customer experience with ⚡ rapid
time-to-market and scalability
Example: Localisation at Twilio

Wrap up
It’s just another customer segment, so treat international/ countries like you do
with vertical sectors.
- Ruthlessly prioritise and go deep 🤿
- Walk in your customers’ shoes 👠🛼👞 - It is the evergreen 🌳 winning
formula!
- Back decisions with facts & data 📊; evangelise by storytelling 🎭
- Reason for ⚖ tradeoff between speed & scale
Let’s Go Global with Your Product! 🚀

Thank you
You were ‘not bad at all’. 💖

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