Signals from Solutions Architects

Hello Navigators! 👋

I'm getting into the swing of things after a busy summer, which included an incredible trip to the Japanese Alps with my wife and kids. We saw family, ate great food, and traveled from Gifu to the Ise Grand Shrine and sounthern Mie Prefecture.

Getting to Japan wasn't easy because Covid has significantly disrupted air travel. The flights we would normally take were too expensive or completely booked. So, to get from our home in New Hampshire to Centrair Airport outside of Nagoya took us 25 hours.  

But, we made some few new friends while we were there, so it was worth it.

Not only that, but I had plenty of time to catch up on reading.

One of the books on my list was Stephen Covey's The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. If you haven't heard of it before, the title might strike you as yet another self-help book. And it is in some ways, of course, but not like you might expect. The book was originally published by Covey in 1988 and is packed with insights about human behavior, relationships and finding your motivation.

I want to share one passage that jumped out at me. I have been a solutions architect (SA) in the localization industry for seven years, and the following anecdote reminded me of a common scenario.

The SA position is highly cross functional. The role is some combination of product manager, technical support, translation tool advisor, technology educator, consultative sales and perhaps just a touch of mental health counseling as well. 😊

There are unique challenges and rewards. One distinct challenge might surprise you: getting comfortable delivering bad news.

Here's the passage cited by Covey in his book that caught my eye. It is written by Frank Koch in Proceedings, the magazine published by the U.S. Naval Institute.

"Two battleships assigned to the training squadron had been at sea on maneuvers in heavy weather for several days. I was serving on the lead battleship and was on watch on the bridge as night fell.

The visibility was poor with patchy fog, so the captain remained on the bridge keeping an eye on all activities.

Shortly after dark, the lookout on the wing of the bridge reported, “Light, bearing on the starboard bow.”

“Is it steady or moving astern?” the captain called out.

Lookout replied, “Steady, captain,” which meant we were on a dangerous collision course with that ship.

The captain then called to the signalman, “Signal that ship: We are on a collision course, advise you change course 20 degrees.”

Back came a signal, “Advisable for you to change course 20 degrees.”

The captain said, “Send, I’m a captain, change course 20 degrees.”

“I’m a seaman second class,” came the reply.

“You had better change course 20 degrees.”

By that time, the captain was furious. He spat out, “Send, I’m a battleship. Change course 20 degrees.”

Back came the flashing light, “I’m a lighthouse.”

We changed course."

(Covey, Stephen, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Simon & Schuster, Location 590)

What we do

The analogy is a touch hyperbolic. Localization is not life or death (as far as I know). However, my fellow SAs and I send signals just like this all the time, both to customers and to our colleagues.

An SA in the localization space is responsible for understanding a customer's technical requirements for setting up a localization program. She evaluates the aspects of the customer's tech stack that are germane, such as the CMS hosting the customer's website or the code repository hosting UI strings.

The SA then maps the requirements against what the LSP or TMS has to offer, determines the feasibility of executing them, and comes up with an implementation plan. She does this while aligning internally with the sales representative leading the deal on pricing, customer objectives, onboarding timelines, and so forth.

There are, however, a prodigious number of products on the market that host words to be translated. Conflicts lurk abundantly underneath the promise of plugins, connectors or custom API integrations, like sharks without tail fins.

The technology also evolves at a blistering pace. Endpoints are updated in such a way that they behave differently. Or they are deprecated. New and better systems come to market, luring decision makers to new tools that necessitate migrating data.

The SA's job is to anticipate these challenges through thoroughgoing discovery steps and with support from her product and sales colleagues.

The SA might recommend that a customer take certain steps to be 'localization ready.' This could mean asking a developer to devote hours to an unexpected task. Or she might raise an issue internally that her own team needs to fit into the ever-crowded roadmap. In other words, the SA will inevitably face—despite all efforts—situations that will effectively make no one happy.

Let's take Wordpress as a specific example. It is the most popular CMS.

Let's say a customer sets up a gorgeous, enterprise-level website with dynamic webpages, ecomm pages, calls to action, videos... the works. When it's time to localize the site, the customer will need a plugin because core Wordpress features are insufficient for that purpose. Alas, they find that the theme on Wordpress conflicts with the plugin. Not all translatable text can be extracted.

In sales cycles, it is the SA working with her production team that discovers this. "We pseudo-translated three pages, and two of them came back in English." (Or whichever source language the site may be authored in.)

Suddenly, work needs to be done by high-value resources on the customer side.

To be clear, Wordpress is powerful and the plugins I personally work with most—WPML and Polylang—add a rich array of localization features. But even the best developers can't anticipate everything. And it is often the SA that finds herself in the position of pointing this out.

This is not to say that the SA role is special relative to others in the corporate world. Is there one that doesn't have its own challenges? Further, any up-and-coming SA should not despair. The SA role gives unparalled exposure to multiple functions of a company all at once and is a great opportunity for career advancement.  The point is that the role does include an element of being unpopular at times, and it takes a certain measure of maturity and poise to handle it.

Covey concludes his passage about the lighthouse anecdote as below:

The paradigm shift experienced by the captain—and by us as we read this account—puts the situation in a totally different light. We can see a reality that is superseded by his limited perception—a reality that is as critical for us to understand in our daily lives as it was for the captain in the fog.

(Covey, Stephen, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Simon & Schuster, Location 590)

Throughtout my trip to Japan, I reflected on my own 'limited perceptions' and found the exercise to be liberating. Fertile ground for more posts.

That I discovered a passage that centers on a lighthouse—which is the above-the-fold picture on my home page and the main theme of my LocNavigator newsletter—was also just too serendipitous to pass up.

Thank you for reading this. I'm excited to share more this fall!