Leading design across markets that don't share assumptions
Working across markets has taught me that the hardest differences are rarely linguistic. They're usually differences in what people take for granted about how shopping, trust or service is supposed to work.
Multiple markets early
At Thomas Cook I worked across multiple brands and multiple international markets during a platform migration. That was my first proper exposure to the idea that a single journey has to behave differently depending on where the customer sits.
Springer Nature reinforced it in a different context. Scientific publishing platforms serve a global research community, and the assumptions researchers bring vary quite a lot by institution and region.
In both cases the pull towards one universal solution was strong, mostly because it's cheaper. It's also frequently wrong in ways you don't find out about for months.
London and Beijing
At JoyBuy I lead a multidisciplinary UX and Digital Design organisation split across London and Beijing. Part of my role is running the collaboration between the European and Chinese teams so decisions are made with both perspectives present.
The time zone difference is the visible constraint. The less visible one is that a decision can be entirely reasonable in one market and quietly unworkable in another, and nobody in the room notices until it ships.
I have found written context matters more than I expected. Anything that relies on people having been in the same conversation tends not to survive the distance.
Representing the customer
A specific part of my job is representing European customer behaviour in decisions taken elsewhere. That means being able to explain not just what European customers do differently but why, in terms the other team can act on.
Research helps here more than argument. When I can point to observed behaviour, the conversation moves from opinion to evidence fairly quickly.
It also means accepting that I'm sometimes the one who has to change position. My read of a market is a model, and models are wrong at the edges.
What travels and what doesn't
Design systems travel reasonably well. Craft standards travel well. Research methods travel well with some adaptation.
What doesn't travel cleanly is anything encoding an assumption about trust, payment habits or service expectations. Those need to be held loosely and checked locally.
I'm still working out where the line sits. My current approach is to be quite firm about the underlying principle and fairly relaxed about how each market expresses it.
Where I’ve done this
- Leads a multidisciplinary UX and Digital Design organisation at JoyBuy split across London and Beijing, running collaboration between the European and Chinese teams.
- Represents European customer behaviour in decisions taken in other markets.
- Led UX across multiple brands and international markets at Thomas Cook Group, including a platform migration and discovery to booking journeys.
- Worked on complex global platforms in scientific publishing at Springer Nature.