The 1st Meeting
Product Manager: People, this could be a game changer! Think of the paid content we could open up to non-english speakers in those markets. How fast can we get it into trunk?
Engineer: First we have to figure out what *it* is.
Product Manager: I want users to be able to click a button in the main dropdown menu and translate all their text.
Engineering Manager: Shouldn’t we verify with the user which language they want? Many in the EU speak multiple languages. Also do we want translation per page?
Product Manager: Worry about translation per page later. Yeah, verify with user is fine as long as we only do it once.
Engineering Manager: It doesn’t quite work like that. If you want translation per page later, we’ll need to architect this so it can support that in the future.
Product Manager: …Fine
Engineer: What about pages that fail translation? What would we display in that case?
Product Manager: Throw an error bar at the top and show the original page. That’ll cover languages the service can’t handle too. Use the standard error template from UX.
Engineering Manager: What device actually does the translation? The phone?
Product Manager: No, make the server do it, bandwidth on phones is precious and spotty. When they start up the phone next, it should download the content already translated to our app.
Engineer: Ok, well if there’s a server involved, we need to talk to the Ops folks.
Engineering Manager: and the DBAs. We’ll also need to find who is the expert on user data handling. We could be handling a lot of that before this is out.
Project Manager: Next UI release is in 6 weeks. I’ll see about scheduling some time with Ops and the database team.
Product Manager: Can you guys pull it off?
Engineer: Depends on the server folks’ schedule.
Who brought up user data safety & privacy concerns in this conversation?
The Engineering Manager.