International expansion doesn’t happen overnight. It’s the result of intentional investment in the right areas, at the right times.
Successful strategy starts with understanding the Pillars of International Growth: establishing strong product/culture fit, ensuring customer accessibility, and investing in universal currencies to help your company grow across international borders.
In order to establish those pillars for your business, you’ll need to build a dynamic international growth model, as discussed in How to Understand and Unlock International Growth Loops. Your growth model will allow your company to compare performance of its core growth loops across regions and countries as a basis for developing market-specific international growth playbooks.
The final step is the topic of this post: how to build an international growth team capable of executing against the company’s international growth strategy and market-specific playbooks.
Specifically, we highlight three important steps every company must take to ensure that international growth efforts are setup for success:
Secure top-down buy-in: International growth is a marathon not a sprint, requiring a significant investment in time and resources. For international expansion to succeed, the CEO and board must be committed to making it a top priority and have a clear understanding for why it matters and how it fits into the company’s broader vision.
Align around shared criteria for success: Once buy-in is secured, executives must align around an international growth strategy with clear milestones and success criteria. This is critical for building confidence, ensuring accountability, and helping the company measure whether or not international growth efforts are on track.
Establish the right organizational structure: Finally, companies must be thoughtful about how they organize international teams to ensure the right people are in the right roles to solve the most important problems they must overcome to satisfy the Pillars of International Growth and achieve their international goals.
Phil Carter is the Senior Director of Growth at Quizlet, an EdTech unicorn that serves students and teachers around the globe. He was previously a founder, venture capital investor, and Director of Product at Ibotta.
Secure Top-Down Buy-In
Before you can build an international growth team, you’ll need to build the right scaffolding — from the top down — about why international expansion matters for your business. In other words, the CEO and board must be committed to making international growth a top priority.
This is critical for building confidence, ensuring accountability, and helping the company measure whether or not international growth efforts are on track.
“As a first principle, there must be clear alignment about what international expansion is for and how it serves the company’s broader strategy,” explains Valerie Wagoner, Stripe’s Head of Product for APAC who has previous experience as a founder, executive, and Reforge EIR. “This is essential for establishing durable international growth teams that are setup for success.”
Why Buy-In is So Important
Deciding to expand internationally is one of the most impactful decisions a company can make, but also one of the riskiest. If it’s not clear to everyone at the company why international expansion matters, you won’t secure the time and resources necessary to succeed.
There are several reasons why top-down support for international growth is so important:
International growth is inherently complicated: Companies need a clear vision for what they hope to accomplish and a deep commitment to following through. Otherwise, they can get mired down in the complexity that comes with trying to expand abroad, waste a lot of resources, and ultimately see very little success.
International growth takes time: Understanding international customers, localizing products in other languages, and investing in relevant content and features to achieve product/culture fit takes a long time. There are no shortcuts, especially when a company is up against local competitors who understand their customers better and whose very survival depends on winning their home market.
International growth forces difficult tradeoffs: Every investment in international business will be held up against the already-successful domestic business, and it’s important that the company’s CEO and board understand the tradeoffs.
"Most companies decide to expand internationally after achieving strong product/market fit domestically," explains Ravi Mehta, cofounder at Scale and former Reforge EIR, CPO at Tinder, and VP of Product at TripAdvisor. "These companies face a dilemma. In the short term, it's suboptimal to divert resources away from high ROI initiatives in their home market. Given this dilemma, one of the first things a growth leader must do is convince the CEO why a long-term investment in international growth makes sense despite the short-term trade-offs."
How to Secure Buy-In
As a growth leader, how do I get my CEO and board bought into a substantial commitment to international growth? Every company is different, but the most basic requirements are a clear articulation of the long-term strategic value of international growth and some quantification of the size of the opportunity and expected ROI. This is especially important given the tradeoff highlighted above between driving greater short-term growth domestically vs. expanding long-term potential by growing abroad. In their post Product Work Beyond Product Market Fit, Fareed Mosavat and Casey Winters explain the importance of Product/Market Fit Expansion as a specific type of product work necessary to avoid saturation and maintain high growth rates.
For growth leaders who struggle to get the full commitment they need upfront, consider these other ways that companies have achieved leverage to fuel international investments:
Incentives: “At AllTrails, when we really got serious about international expansion, we tied a material chunk of our executive bonuses to international registration growth so that everyone was fully bought in,” shares Ron Schneidermann, the company's CEO. “This idea came directly from our board, and it helped ensure that everyone’s incentives were aligned.”
Resource-Boxing: “At TripAdvisor, we initially devoted a limited amount of headcount for international growth to support a small market development team with a localization lead and a limited engineering budget,” explains Ravi Mehta. “This was an easy ask relative to the size of the opportunity. Then, once that small team showed the impact they could make, we were able to dedicate more resources.”
Once growth leaders are able to get the CEO and board firmly behind international growth and committed to the resources required to achieve success, everything else gets a little easier.
Align Around Shared Criteria for Success
Buy-in isn’t a one-and-done deal. Once the CEO and board are aligned on why international growth matters and commit to it as a strategic priority, the next step is to get the executive team aligned on a more specific roadmap to support successful expansion for your business.
“Everyone generally agrees on the end state, which is to be the dominant global competitor in the company’s space,” says Ravi Mehta. “What’s trickier is getting everyone to agree on the roadmap for how to get there.” This early alignment will set you up to get the ongoing endorsement your team needs to accomplish its goals in the long term.
“It’s very difficult to have impact internationally without deep and lasting executive buy in,” according to Lorna Whelan, who spent 12 years at TripAdvisor leading the localization team. “When I first joined TripAdvisor, there was clear and consistent executive commitment to making international growth a top priority. Later, there was a shakeup within the C-suite, and we lost a lot of this support. Our team was pulled out of the product organization and put into our own silo, which made it more difficult to get the resources we needed to do our best work.”
3 Areas Your Company Needs to Align On
Securing top-down alignment on “why” international growth matters to a company provides a necessary foundation, but before international growth teams can make any real progress, it’s important to get executives and other cross-functional stakeholders aligned around tactical details for bringing the company’s international growth strategy to life.
The most important areas to align on are:
When/Where: A timeline and set of milestones for when the company plans to expand to specific international markets. It should be clear to everyone why the company is prioritizing certain countries above others.
What: A set of well-defined milestones and success criteria to help determine whether the company is on track. For example, a company might establish one milestone around localizing its product in the native language, a second around achieving product/culture fit, and a third around scaling up one or more cost-efficient acquisition channels. Each milestone would be tied to specific success criteria so that the company can clearly evaluate whether it’s achieved one milestone before moving on to the next.
How: A playbook outlining how the company will reach its milestones and achieve its success criteria in each market. This might start with small tests to confirm your hypotheses, then grow to include a set of predictable and repeatable levers it can use to drive sustainable growth in a given market.
Aligning executives on these specifics is critical for establishing a robust international strategy and setting the growth teams who will execute this strategy up for success.
“Think about what has to be true, and the hardest questions that need to be validated to ensure these things are true,” says Valerie Wagoner. “Then walk it back to establish clear milestones that help validate these questions. This helps build confidence among executive stakeholders that things are on track.”
Another effective tactic is to conduct a listening tour with each executive before defining the international growth strategy to make sure stakeholders feel heard.
“Before I outlined our international growth strategy, I solicited questions from members of the leadership team so I could make sure to address them,” recounts Karin Nielsen, Head of International Expansion at Levels. “Then I followed up with each individual to get more context, and incorporated their thoughts into our success criteria.”
Establish the Right Organizational Structure
With the CEO and board firmly committed and the executive team aligned, you’re ready to build an international growth team capable of executing on the company’s strategy.
Hopefully by this point, the growth leader has established what the most important problems are that the company needs to solve first to achieve agreed upon milestones and success criteria. The international growth team should be structured in a way that optimizes for putting the right people in the right roles to solve these problems.
“The important thing is to think about the most important activities you need to be great at to compete internationally,” says Ravi Mehta. "This is a difficult question because the right answer depends on the company’s products, customers, and business model.”
3 Core Areas to Focus Your International Growth Organization
While there is no perfect answer, most companies tend to have common needs clustered around three core areas:
1. Localization
Companies need people to translate products and communications into the native languages spoken in their target markets. This might include marketing campaigns, landing pages, new user onboarding flows, core product messaging, and/or lifecycle marketing communications like email and push notifications.
Lorna Whelan, who worked with Ravi at TripAdvisor, explains that, “Hiring a full-time localization lead early is critical for establishing the right foundational infrastructure, tools, and processes to launch multiple markets simultaneously and support global business.”
Barron Ernst shares that, “A lot of localization leaders are multilingual copywriters which is a great foundation, but the best ones also have technical skills and understand how to build scalable systems.” A strong localization team is a force multiplier for all of a company’s international growth efforts.
2. International Product
Companies need people to develop and refine product features to meet local market needs. Initially, this may be a single PM focused on one market or customer need. As international growth efforts expand, it often evolves into a director managing a group of PMs mapped to particular countries or regions.
As Crystal Widjaja, CPO at Kumu and former SVP of Growth at Gojek, explains, “The important thing is to provide focus. A common mistake companies should generally avoid is asking a product team focused on a company’s home market to find spare bandwidth and spend 20-40% of its time working on international growth. Stepchild international projects don’t work.”
To understand the nuances of international customers and build products that meet their needs, PMs and their teams need to be given adequate time and resources to go deep.
3. Local Go-to-Market
Companies need people to lead local go-to-market efforts. Initially, companies may take a lean approach with a business development person and/or community manager assigned to each target market to get local growth flywheels going. Over time, this typically evolves into country managers functioning as GMs and managing larger go-to-market teams. These people often report up through marketing, and are responsible for overseeing local business operations, managing spend, and driving top line growth in their respective countries and regions.
How to Organize International Growth Teams
Once you understand the talent required to drive international business, your next challenge is organizing these groups of people in a way that allows them to work together efficiently. It’s notoriously difficult to get right.
"At Tripadvisor and Tinder, there were a number of teams with overlapping international responsibilities: country management, market development, localization, and product teams working on global features,” explains Ravi Mehta. “At times, the structure felt complicated, but it was better than the alternative, which ran the risk of having important international priorities fall through the cracks."
Companies have experimented with all sorts of different organizational structures, but they generally fall into three archetypes, each with its own tradeoffs:
Vertical Model: In the vertical model, a fully-independent and autonomous international team is established with dedicated resources for product, engineering, sales, marketing, and any other functions necessary for the team to achieve its goals.
Horizontal Model: In the horizontal model, international growth efforts are embedded across the company’s existing product, engineering, sales, and marketing teams and prioritized against core initiatives focused on the company’s home market.
Matrix Model: In the matrix model, the company takes a hybrid approach. This can take a lot of different forms, but generally it means having a VP of International or equivalent senior leader directly managing country managers or GMs responsible for each market. This team then works horizontally with PMs, engineers, and marketers to prioritize the most critical work necessary for accelerating growth in target markets.
Again, there is no perfect answer. Companies should be pragmatic and open to changing their international growth teams as challenges evolve. And there will often be tradeoffs as you experiment with different organizational models.
“There is a Catch 22 when it comes to organizational structure,” explains Lorna Whelan. “If you build a vertical international team, they often end up operating in a silo and struggling to get sufficient resources. But if you embed international growth horizontally in product and marketing, these efforts often get deprioritized in favor of domestic initiatives with greater short-term impact potential. TripAdvisor tried both of these models at various points, and each worked well enough, but no matter what we did there were always pain points and sources of friction.”
The key is to keep asking what the most important problems are to solve at any given time and optimizing team structure to solve those problems, even if it creates inefficiency elsewhere.
It’s also critical to ensure clear ownership and accountability. As Talia Baruch says, “When everyone owns international, nobody does.” Talia’s approach is to “consider the holistic user journey from discoverability in a new market, through engaged acquisition, conversion, retention and brand loyalty in each geography. What problem we are solving for, who we optimize the solution for, and how we define and measure success are fundamental strategic questions that must be reassessed in new markets. Weaving in the regional and cultural factors will inform the right product experience and value-add repositioning in the brand’s new market adoption.”
Where Should International Growth Teams be Located?
On one hand, Zoom and other technologies have made remote work so efficient that physical location — and sharing the same office — matters less than it ever has before. On the other hand, when your international success depends so much on understanding the local market and culture, local talent becomes a big point of leverage.
International growth teams should focus first on finding the best people with the skills and experience needed to solve the company's biggest challenges — everything else is secondary. But when it comes to the question of where international growth teams should be located, there’s no one-size-fits-all answer.
Barron Ernst believes “there is no substitute for leaders living and working in target markets themselves to deeply understand customers and what they need.”
However, Ravi Mehta explains his team at TripAdvisor wasn’t prescriptive about where its talent was located: “GMs and marketers tended to be local whereas product and engineering was more flexible, but there were plenty of exceptions. The most important thing was getting the right people with the right skills — where they chose to work was a secondary consideration.”
Many companies start with a more decentralized approach and evolve towards centralized offices in common hubs like London or Singapore as international teams reach critical mass.
How Much Should Executives Get Involved in Execution?
We’ve discussed how the CEO, board, and executives must be involved in the upfront commitment to international growth and the hard work required to set a clear vision, strategy, and roadmap. But when it comes to getting involved in day-to-day execution, executive involvement is about balance. “If executives don’t lean in enough, teams may wander aimlessly and not make real progress, but if they lean in too much, progress can grind to a halt and morale can suffer,” explains Barron Ernst. “You want to find a balance, where executives are focused on discussing strategically important topics, removing roadblocks, and ensuring teams are adequately resourced.”
Keeping executives focused on these high-leverage topics maximizes their time while empowering international growth teams to move quickly and take calculated risks.
International Growth is Complex, But Important
For technology companies, international growth has never been more important or achievable than it is now. This presents massive new opportunities, but it also presents new risks because companies are increasingly facing competition not just from domestic businesses but foreign entrants as well. The companies that are best equipped to adapt their products and services to international markets have a distinct advantage over their competition.
However, international growth continues to be difficult and complex. There are no easy answers, but hopefully this blog series on the Pillars of International Growth, How to Understand and Unlock International Growth Loops, and How to Build an International Growth Team has provided you with a valuable set of frameworks and real-world examples that will help you navigate these challenges at your own company.
If you want to discuss your experiences with international growth, reach out to Phil on LinkedIn or Twitter. In the meantime, subscribe here to get insights from other leaders in the Reforge Network, and check out Reforge’s Growth Series and Advanced Growth Strategy courses for lessons that will help you to navigate challenges at your own company!
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