An empty meeting room at the top of a building, the city on the other side of the glass.

04.3 · Expansion, and what constrains it.

International Relations

Entering another country is not translating a product. It is discovering that a mandatory field here does not exist there, that a procedure has another name and another deadline, and that a regulation going through parliament can change the market in a quarter. That is this department's work.

A quién sirve

The whole group

And it works most for Cal-1, which goes international from day one with three axes that do not get conflated: the language, the country, and where the user is.

What it does

  1. Expansion

    Analysis of each market, contacts, and adapting the product to what exists there. The expensive part is not translation: it is the data model.

  2. Regulatory monitoring

    What is going through parliament in each country and what would change if it passes. In a regulated sector, a bill in progress is market information.

  3. Institutional presence

    Participation in sector forums and relations with regulators. It is what stops a rule arriving as a surprise.

  4. Crisis management

    Contingency and communication plans for when something goes wrong away from home.

A vehicle's compulsory technical inspection exists in many countries and is not the same procedure translated: the interval changes, who performs it, what gets checked and what happens if it fails. Treating it as a word to be translated produces a product showing a field that means nothing there. That cannot be fixed in the language layer — it is fixed earlier, in the model.

The case that explains the whole thing

It does not decide which markets to enter: it prepares the information the decision is made with. The decision belongs to the plan, and the plan belongs to management.

What it does not do