When I joined Toastmasters back in 2015, I did it after years of frustration. I had this feeling that I knew things, but I wasn’t always able to explain them properly. The real turning point happened a few years before, in 2010, when I was working at Electronic Arts. I had to give a presentation at EA’s Vancouver studio about Localization for the Need for Speed game I was working on, and it wasn’t good, better said, it was really a disaster …
I was super nervous, blocked, feeling awful… the whole thing. I left that room thinking: never again. I never wanted to feel like that again when giving a presentation. And I guess that was the beginning of more than a decade of paying much more attention to public speaking, persuasion, and communication with impact.
Localization Managers are often expected to keep many stakeholders happy: leadership, content teams, linguists, product teams, regional teams, finance, and procurement. But maybe happiness is not the real goal. In this post, I reflect on why stakeholder alignment matters more, and how Localization can make expectations, hidden work, ownership, and trade-offs more visible