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 accountability gap at the heart of at the center of global expansion strategy.
In most SaaS organizations, cross-market growth is the second or third priority of multiple people. Product is focused on one market, marketing is looking at another, and nobody is seeing the whole picture. Everyone has a view. Nobody is accountable for the outcome.
This is a structural problem, and Kevin O’Donnell believes it requires a structural fix.
The accountability gap
Kevin has spent more than twenty years working in international growth at Microsoft, Nitro, and Dropbox. The pattern he finds in almost every company he advises is the same. International is on the strategic plan and investment is flowing. But no single person at leadership level owns global performance as their primary responsibility.
The consequence is that investment, attention, and strategy pull in different directions. The conflicts between teams go unresolved because there is no single point of accountability. And the signals that would tell leadership where to focus, where to invest more, and where something is going wrong never get surfaced in a coherent way.
Meanwhile, the revenue case for getting this right is well established. CSA Research found that B2B buyers are three times more likely to purchase when addressed in their own language, and 40% of consumers will never buy from a site that isn’t in theirs. The data is clear. The question is who owns the responsibility of turning it into results.
The case for a C-level role
Kevin’s recommendation is direct. Put someone at the C-level table whose entire job is international expansion. A Chief International Officer or VP of International Growth is a dedicated leadership role responsible for ensuring that product, pricing, and go-to-market decisions account for international markets from the start.
“It makes international the top priority of somebody sitting at the C-level table, rather than the second or third priority of many different people.”
A global-first mindset, one that builds international considerations into product, pricing, and go-to-market decisions from the start, needs someone at the table accountable for making it happen.
That person changes how decisions are made. They ask what a pricing change means for users in Japan. They flag when a product launch designed for one market won’t work in another. And crucially, they hold the business accountable for international performance in a way nobody else in the room is responsible for.
A global-first operating model requires someone empowered to challenge assumptions built around a single home market and hold the organization accountable for international performance in measurable commercial terms.
Making it work across twenty markets
The challenge Kevin acknowledges is that the role requires holding twenty or more markets in view simultaneously. His approach, both at Dropbox and in his advisory work through Global10x, is market tiering. Group markets by revenue contribution and growth potential. Apply different strategies and investment levels to each tier.
But the tiers have to stay dynamic, reviewed quarterly, and reshuffled when the data demands it. A fixed list is no good because markets shift. The real value goes beyond resource allocation. It gets marketing, sales, product, and research aligned on what tier one actually means, because in Kevin’s experience, those teams are often pulling in completely different directions.
“So often I find marketing will look at Japan, but product is looking over at Germany, and maybe research is looking at India. And they’re all split into different directions.”
When those teams share a common framework and a common set of priorities, the company moves as one. When they don’t, investment scatters and impact dilutes.
Tying it to business goals
Kevin is equally clear that the work has to connect to what the business already cares about. International growth that can’t explain itself in terms of the company’s commercial ambitions will always be treated as a cost center.
“If your focus for international expansion or localization is not tied to the business goals, then really you are reinforcing that narrative of you are a cost centre.”
The companies that succeed internationally are the ones that connect multilingual experiences directly to the metrics leadership already cares about. Revenue growth, conversion, retention, expansion and market penetration.
That accountability starts at leadership level, but it only becomes meaningful when the language, metrics, and priorities align across the organization.
Platforms such as Phrase increasingly support that shift by giving international leaders visibility into how multilingual content and customer experiences perform market by market, tied directly to the business outcomes shaping investment decisions.
Global expansion rarely fails because companies lack ambition.
More often, it fails because no one inside the business is structurally accountable for making global growth work as a coordinated strategy rather than a collection of disconnected regional efforts.
Watch the full conversation with Kevin O’Donnell on In Other Words.
