A few years ago, I watched a product decision almost ship without the language experts in the room, and it’s stayed with me as one of the clearest examples of why that seat at the table matters.
Research and Product were building a feature that let companies set style rules for translated content - tone, formality, spelling conventions, that kind of thing.
The early version was built around the rules and conventions of one language, and those assumptions were being carried over into other languages as if they would work in the same way.
The problem is that languages don’t work like that. Grammar, formality, tone and style can vary enormously between languages. A rule that makes perfect sense in one can be meaningless, or actively wrong, in another.
It was caught before it shipped, which is the part I’m genuinely proud of. Once the language experts were brought into the conversation, the feature was rebuilt around the idea that style rules need to work per language, rather than being carried over wholesale from one to another. It’s live now, and it works, because someone eventually asked the language question early enough to matter.
This is something I’ve seen quite often in this work. It’s rarely that product or research teams get language wrong on purpose. It’s that language expertise often isn’t in the room when the assumptions get built in, and by the time it is, you’re fixing instead of designing.