Kevin O’Donnell, founder of Global10x and former VP of International Growth at Dropbox, joined Jason Hemingway on the In Other Words podcast to talk about the reporting gap that’s hiding international growth problems in plain sight, and why the teams closest to the data are making it worse.
Most companies Kevin O’Donnell works with don’t have an international dashboard. They look at a single global revenue number and assume it tells them everything they need to know.
It almost never is.
What the global number hides
An international dashboard breaks global revenue and performance metrics down by individual market, surfacing the signals that a single aggregate figure hides. When you build one and start looking at the data market by market, patterns emerge that should be driving strategic decisions.
A market with strong user adoption but weak paid conversion suggests a disconnect in pricing or messaging. Rising churn in another market points to a product experience issue nobody has investigated. Meanwhile, a tier-two market might be outperforming expectations with little investment or executive attention.
These are the kinds of signals that change where a company allocates resources. In many organizations, the data already exists. The reporting infrastructure does not.
“More often than not, there is no international dashboard. That’s the one thing to change.”
The metrics that matter
Kevin’s recommendation is straightforward. Take the metrics the business already cares about and break them down by market. Paid conversion rates. Churn rates. Activation rates. Product usage data. Acquisition data. The same metrics leadership already tracks at a global level, applied at a market level with investment mapped against them.
He is equally clear on cadence. This cannot become an annual planning exercise reviewed once and forgotten. Leadership teams need a quarterly checkpoint that looks across markets, measures whether investment changed outcomes, and identifies where strategy or execution needs to adapt.
“There needs to be a quarterly checkpoint where you’re looking at a dashboard across all the different tiers. You look at the metrics that matter and ask, did the work we put in last quarter meaningfully shift the dial.”
The teams closest to the data are telling the wrong story
The reporting problem is not limited to leadership teams. In many cases, localization teams are undermining their own influence by focusing on operational throughput instead of commercial impact.
“A lot of localization teams will still report on how many words they translated last quarter. They need to stop that immediately. Frankly, nobody cares about that.”
Kevin compares it to an engineering leader reporting on lines of code written. It measures activity, not impact. What gets attention from leadership is showing that a localized experience in Germany grew usage 40%, or a hyper-localized homepage lifted sign-up rates in Japan. That kind of story connects work directly to the metrics the business already cares about.
From cost center to growth driver
The shift Kevin describes is fundamental. Localization teams sit on more market knowledge, cultural expertise, and customer insight than most organizations realize. The question is whether they can articulate that value in commercial terms.
Kevin’s advice is to start with the metrics your immediate leadership already cares about and align reporting with the priorities of the department you sit within. A team within marketing might focus on paid conversion or sign-up rates. A team within product might look at activation or NPS scores. The key is finding the metric that connects to the mission of your part of the organization.
“If they show up at a product review and talk about how the localized checkout flow in Germany grew usage 40%, then you’re connecting work with a material impact on revenue and on the customer.”
“By focusing on the metrics that your leadership care about, you’re going to get their attention. And by saying, my priorities are aligned with you, we can achieve more, we can do more.”
Dr. Arle Lommel of CSA Research, speaking on a separate Phrase panel, offered a complementary perspective on this challenge. He acknowledged the power imbalance that localization teams often face within organizations and suggested a pragmatic approach.
“The move is to become the power behind the throne. You find somebody else who gets the credit, but you help them do it, and use their power to get this through.”
The two approaches work together. Kevin’s advice is about aligning localization reporting with the metrics leadership already values. Arle’s is about navigating organizational dynamics to get that value recognized.
Expert panel: Scaling content to win
The teams that learn to connect their work to business outcomes will be treated as growth contributors. The ones that keep reporting on output will continue to be considered an operational expense. In a landscape where AI is making it possible to automate high-volume content at scale, teams that can’t make the strategic case for their expertise face a difficult question about their future role.
Making international performance visible
This is where platforms add value. When teams can see how multilingual content is performing market by market, as platforms like Phrase make possible, proving business impact becomes far easier because the data already exists.
The international dashboard is the foundation. Without it, every conversation about international performance is based on incomplete information. With it, leadership teams and the localization functions that support them can make informed decisions about where to invest, which markets to prioritize, and where the operating model needs to change.
Watch the full conversation with Kevin O’Donnell on In Other Words.
