Embracing Global Markets through Strategic Localization: Unpacking the Real-World Journey with Björn Ingmansson

For B2B SaaS companies, expanding into global markets should not be treated as just another box to tick, but rather as a game-changing move that demands much more than just translation. What’s needed is deep cultural awareness, market-specific adaptations, and processes that can scale to match your company’s growth. To really understand what works (and what doesn’t), we sat down with Björn Ingmansson, whose roots span Sweden and France and whose experience runs from fintech start-ups to cutting-edge autonomous vehicle tech.

Björn’s journey is rich with practical lessons and hard-won insights about what it truly takes to go global. In this article, we dig into the true nature of localization, common pitfalls, and strategies that help companies unlock international growth, all rooted in Björn’s first-hand experience.

A Multicultural Foundation: Björn’s Early Perspectives

Björn’s approach to localization is shaped by his own multicultural upbringing. Born to Swedish parents, but raised in France, he quickly learned to adapt, not just at home, but in school and in day-to-day interactions.

“I look very Swedish, sound Swedish, but I grew up in France... I kind of had to adapt to a multicultural home and school.”

This early exposure meant Björn could very easily notice the little nuances and differences that make each culture unique, and which are incredibly important in localization coin.

Early Career: Building Localization Muscles in Fintech

Björn’s first professional steps were at Graduateland (a part of JobTeaser since 2022) and then Pleo, working directly on Swedish market launches and product adaptations. In these roles he wasn’t simply arranging for content to be translated, he was effectively working on the architecture of the entry effort into the new market.

At Pleo, Björn was the first Swedish hire and was tasked with no less than launching the company’s entire operations in Sweden. Localization efforts went far beyond translation. The team had to adjust for local accounting rules, tax systems, and even rethink core features for Sweden’s business environment.

“Translating all these terms from English to Swedish wasn’t as straightforward as it seemed... We had this thing called ‘wallet,’ but translating it to wallet in Swedish just didn’t work. You need a native-level understanding to make those decisions.”

This simple example highlights a key point: Localization is never just about language. It’s about making hundreds of nuanced, market-specific choices that often call for input from different departments within a company (i.e. product, marketing and legal), as well as local language experts.

Scaling Up: From European Markets to Global Expansion

Björn’s next move was with Juni, another high-growth fintech where rapid expansion across European markets demanded agility. But it was when he joined Kognic, a software company serving the world’s autonomous vehicle industry, that he had a chance to really experience how important localization can be for expansion into new territories, and how multifaceted localization efforts need to be in order to maximize their effectiveness.

Talking about Kognic, Björn says: “Here we’re not just expanding to European countries. We’re expanding to new areas like Asia and the US.” As Björn quickly realized, localization needs are very different when you move away from a European context to expand, for example, into Asian markets. Within Europe, even markets that appear to be similar at a passing glance can present very significant differences. In several of our blog articles we’ve thoroughly discussed the importance of adapting to local regulations, how companies should tailor their messaging to topics that resonate better with local audiences, and even of how segmentation, packaging and pricing strategies can impact the results of expansion efforts. All of these elements of differentiation are relevant for any market, regardless of their geographical distribution, but it’s undeniable that, as diverse as European markets can be, they do share many similarities and common traits. That’s particularly handy for SaaS businesses facing European expansion, as we discussed with SaaSiest’s founders, because the particularity of the European SaaS landscape allows founders and companies to share insights and learn from each other.

However, expanding outside of Europe brings about a new level of complexities. In automotive tech, the area in which Kognic operates, local regulations, user preferences, and integration requirements multiply. What works in one country could need a complete overhaul elsewhere, and technical integrations must match systems used locally, which are completely different in China, for example, compared to those used in Europe.

Björn’s journey shows that the bigger and more technical the product, the more localization needs to become a strategic function, not just a matter of support. Product design should be influenced by the languages in which the product itself will be deployed. Within the European context, this might be as simple as ensuring the app strings are not hard-coded, and the design is somewhat adaptive to allow for text expansion when strings are translated from English into more verbose languages such as German or French. Beyond the borders of Europe, however, companies have to take into account the possibility of having to partially or completely redesign the UI to make it more user-friendly for the local target audience. For right-to-left languages such as Arabic, for example, the whole distribution of the elements should be mirrored, to account for the way users are accustomed to scan and process information. Similarly, ideogram-based languages such as Chinese or Japanese will require very different text distribution compared to the original English UI.

All of these complexities, if not taken into account from very early stages, could derail even the best funded expansion effort. One of the best ways to prevent this from happening is to involve localization early in the process of product development, thus moving from localization as an afterthought, to a comprehensive localization strategy that is an integral part of the product development cycle.

Debunking Localization Myths: Translation Is Just the Tip of the Iceberg

One of the persistent misconceptions Björn encounters is the idea that localization equals translation. According to him, founders often think localizing simply means translating a product from one language into another, and that’s it, as far as they are concerned. “But really, from my experience, it’s a long-term process. It’s something that needs to be very process-oriented, tooling-oriented,” he says. Here are two key challenges companies often overlook, according to him:

Underestimating complexity: People see localization as a simple translation task and miss its scale and cost, especially when it touches product, marketing, support, and more. Especially in the last few years, with the advancements in machine translation and AI translation, people often expect localization to be completely hands off and almost free. The reality is that, even with great AI tools, human reviews and native expertise are still essential, and often cutting corners here translates into clunky off-brand communications that don’t convert, costing the company big in terms of missed revenue. Fixing this misconception requires a shift of paradigm, changing the way localization is viewed within the company: no longer a cost, but an investment and a growth lever.  

Ignoring the stakeholder web: Effective localization means aligning marketing, product, customer success, and sales teams. Everyone needs to be on board with the effort and understand this is something important for the organization as a whole, not just for the localization department. Once again, a way to address this challenge is to push for localization to be involved in all relevant departments and at the planning stage, not only for the final execution, making sure different stakeholders within the company are aware of the value of localization. 

For all these reasons, according to Björn, “It’s best to involve localization as early as possible. Otherwise you might do all the work and realize you have an issue late in the process.”

Product Adaptation: Technical and Regulatory Realities

As mentioned above, a strategic approach to localization must take into account some degree of product adjustment. Björn shares several crucial lessons:

Integrations are always local: SaaS products rely on integrations, so it’s essential to offer integrations that are relevant for the local context in order for the product to take off.

Regulatory adaptation: Launching fintech products means building for local tax systems, accounting standards and different currencies.

Core product changes: Even features like payment methods and license requirements can shift fundamentally from market to market.

Involving localization teams along product teams, legal, and market specialists to collaborate closely on every launch allows companies to see the possible challenges ahead, and solve them proactively rather than rushing to fix bugs just before release. 

Marketing Localization: Cultural Sensitivity and Strategy

Björn’s stories illustrate how marketing messages, visual elements, and even campaign concepts must be adapted for local resonance.

He gives us an example: “We had this campaign called ‘power to the people’ for company cards. But translating that to French as ‘pouvoir au peuple’ had connotations of working-class revolution. You absolutely cannot use that in France.”

This might just seem like a funny anecdote, but it perfectly exemplifies how cultural sensitivities can change in different markets, and how important cultural awareness is in marketing. Other things to watch out for are color, imagery, humor, and idioms, which can mean wildly different things in different countries. Also, marketing channels vary across different markets. Björn gives us the example of China, where “Google and Facebook aren’t the way to advertise. You’ve got WeChat and Baidu.”

Björn warns that these apparently minor missteps should not be underestimated, as they can sink entire campaigns.

How to Build a Strategic Localization Framework

Björn offers a practical roadmap for scalable localization, focusing on process, tools, and strategic sequencing.

1. Early Integration

As mentioned before, localization shouldn’t be tacked on at the end, but it needs to be considered from day one. Björn is very aware of how localization often gets put on the back burner in favour of other priorities, but he warns that early planning avoids costly rework. Simple steps such as ensuring localization teams have a seat at product and campaign kickoffs and that feedback loops are put in place so local market insights can help shape both global and local strategy can go a long way to improve the efficiency of the whole process.

2. Tooling for Scale

Modern localization hinges on robust tech and on the premise that this tech is scalable and designed in a way that avoids manual and bottle necks as much as possible, to ensure increases in volume or the addition of new languages don’t cause the system to collapse.

Björn is a strong advocate for Translation Management Systems (TMS), centralized glossaries, and workflow automation. “If you have product emails, a website, a web app, a help center, you already need a TMS. If you have two or more of those, you need it.” 

AI translation can be a very powerful tool, especially in terms of scalability, but Björn warns: “AI models are only as good as the data you feed them.” Without a well-maintained localization infrastructure that includes glossaries, styleguides and translation memories, as well as a process that keeps human language specialists in place to review the content produced by AI (especially high-visibility assets!) and ensure it is fit for purpose, raw AI translations can end up damaging the company’s reputation abroad with clunky off-brand content, which gives prospects the idea that the company does not care enough about the specific market to invest in it.

3. Scaling: Choosing Markets and Phased Expansion

When considering international expansion, market selection is a strategic decision. Sometimes the closest markets are the best starting point. Björn recalls: “At Pleo, we were a Danish company. Sweden was a very natural next market, despite being small. German was more challenging and it took much longer.” While starting with culturally similar markets can often be easier, market similarity and the effort required for a successful launch should always be weighed against the potential of the new market. 

A great strategy to avoid wasting resources while entering new markets is to launch gradually and “build the muscle” before ramping up. Rather than localizing everything at once for one specific market and then moving to the next, apply an MVP approach to to the international expansion effort. Find the Minimum Viable Experience (MVE) for a few high-potential markets and localize in parallel. “Maybe you just need a landing page or help center articles mentioned in onboarding emails. You don’t do all of them at once.” This way you’ll be able to optimize the infrastructure and gather real-world data that will be priceless to inform future localization strategy, both in terms of increased investment for existing markets, and in terms of new market entry.

Björn also recommends streamlining existing content before translating it: “No unnecessary text on the website. Optimized help center articles. Diminishing the amount of pitch decks. Prioritize all your documents.”

How to Make the Business Case for Localization

When it comes to localization, calculating budgets can be tricky due to misalignment between the metrics used by localization teams and management. Furthermore, localization touches so many different business functions that it can be difficult to isolate its impact to calculate ROI.

One thing is certain: Budget conversations get easier with clear numbers and use cases. As Björn reports: “When you put a number in front of a leader, the argument happens very quickly. I convince people internally that we need a TMS because they understand the value.”

In the argument for localization, it’s important to remember that streamlined processes save money and reduce internal friction. Localization is not an all-or-nothing game. Not everything needs to be localized at once, and different types of content can go through different localization workflows. Content segmentation allows for low-visibility, functional content (such as help center articles or support materials) to go through semi-automated workflows that rely heavily on AI translation and automation, at a fraction of the cost of human translation. Any savings can be invested where human expertise and native language sensibility matter the most: crafting relevant messaging for marketing campaigns that increase the conversion rate.

Conclusion

Björn’s journey is a blueprint for authentic, scalable, and strategic localization. His experiences drive home several non-negotiable truths about localization in B2B SaaS:

• Localization is a long-term, process-driven investment.

• Product, marketing, support, and legal—all must align.

• Start early, build gradually, and leverage tools for scale.

• Allocate budget efficiently, prioritizing between markets and assets 

• Use AI intelligently and don’t underestimate the value of local expertise.

As Björn puts it: “Localization is a muscle. You have to start training it as early as possible in order to be ready for when the business opportunity is there.”

For any company eyeing global growth, the message is clear: Strategic localization isn’t optional. It’s how you build products and brands that genuinely connect across borders. At Undertow, we are committed to help you do exactly that. We’ll work with you to create a localization program that fits the unique needs of your business, and we’ll help you set up processes that can scale effortlessly as your business grows. Get in touch to find out more.