How three ambitious companies are growing their business, while keeping their developers happy

Ask any product manager or CTO at a fast-growing tech company and they’ll tell you exactly how important their developers are to their company’s success. Yet in today’s ultra-competitive employer market, attracting the right DevOps talent is no easy task. And once you’ve got a gifted developer on board, you want to do everything you can to keep them happy, so they keep growing alongside your company and its products.

That’s why some of the most ambitious scale-ups around are now selecting development tools to cater specifically to their developers’ needs. It’s all about creating that win-win situation: getting the best tool to support their company’s growth, while also making their developers’ lives easier.

In this edition of our Growth Heroes series, we check in with developers and product managers at three fast-growing tech companies:

• Arduino: An open-source platform that bridges the gap between electronics, design, and programming, with products and services available in 46 languages.
• Indeavor: An industry-leading workforce management and employee scheduling software provider with over 100,000 users worldwide.
• Deliveree: A logistics management provider whose app powers the largest truck fleet in Southeast Asia. 

They’ll tell us about the integrations and tools their developers value most. And we’ll talk about how Lokalise helps their companies accelerate their international growth while boosting engagement and productivity among their development teams.

Automate the tasks your developers hate doing

Localizing your app and other digital content is crucial for expanding into new markets. Yet traditional translation management software (TMS) often lacks the key features required to accelerate the process. Effective localization management automates repetitive tasks that waste your developers’ time and energy. The managers we spoke to explained how important this is for keeping their developers happy. 

Arduino regularly needs to rapidly localize content for one of its digital educational publications, the Arduino Science Journal. With their old translation management software, their developers always had to work on two separate projects at once—one for their Android product version and one for iOS.

This made the localization process tedious and redundant for developers. It also created the risk that content would be translated differently for iOS than for Android.

We looked at other localization management software, but no other option across the market offered such an easy solution as Lokalise, especially from the developers’ perspective.

Gaia Castronovo, Education Localization Specialist at Arduino

Indeavor experienced similar challenges with its old localization process. They would email files to a translation agency for translation first. After this, the development team had to manually create new translation keys. The process was lengthy, redundant, and error-prone—in short, very frustrating for the developers.

With Lokalise, Indeavor’s development team spends 80–90% less time on adding new translation keys.

Sylvia Taube, Senior Product Manager at Indeavor

By using Lokalise, the developers never have to manually create translation keys again. This frees them up to devote their time to more creative tasks where their talent is put to better use.

“Before we switched to Lokalise, it took developers at least half a day to manage the translations and add new keys, whereas, with Lokalise in place, they spend about 80–90% less time on the same tasks,” says Sylvia.

Help your developers work more efficiently

Developers live and breathe efficiency. They have a complicated job to do, and they’re constantly looking for ways to get more done. To keep your developers smiling, work alongside them to find new ways of increasing speed and productivity. That means choosing efficient tools. After all, developers know better than anyone that technology makes things easier.

Deliveree used to work with Excel spreadsheets for its translation projects. But as the company rapidly expanded to more and more language markets, it quickly outgrew this process. Their developers became increasingly frustrated at having to wait to receive spreadsheets and then copy-paste the translations they needed.

Before we had Lokalise, our developer team would lose a lot of time waiting for translations. Now, the developers can work on their tasks without interruptions while translations are automatically updated.

Eric Vu, Backend Developer at Deliveree

With Lokalise, Deliveree’s developers enjoy a streamlined localization process. This is thanks in part to Lokalise’s integration with Bitbucket, which Deliveree uses for their code repository, and Webhooks, which they use to automatically deploy updated content. Localizations are now managed using automated, optimal workflows, with no more annoying spreadsheets and email threads.

“From a development point of view, Lokalise helped us to increase speed and productivity by 50%. For our product team that’s responsible for the translation workflow, the speed has increased by up to 80%,” says Eric.

Sylvia Taube from Indeavor also emphasizes how Lokalise boosts efficiency. Because of its integration with GitLab, Lokalise makes it easy for her to automatically share translated files with the development team. Where localization used to slow things down, it’s now just as efficient as any other critical DevOps process.

Not being the bottleneck of all translation and localization-related things is great. Developers don’t have to wait until I manually send them the prepared files as they can access them via the GitLab integration.

Sylvia Taube, Senior Product Manager at Indeavor

Give your developers the tools they want

Developers are not just tech creators, they are also tech lovers. They know how to spot a powerful development tool that can help them get more out of their work. It’s important to listen to developers’ needs, so you can create the kind of work environment that makes them want to stick around. A big part of that is giving them the tools they demand.

Gaia Castronovo from Arduino says her company switched to Lokalise because it had been so highly recommended to her by developers in her network. Now, Lokalise is an indispensable tool for Arduino’s developers.

Our developers refuse to work with any other localization software, and they only want to use Lokalise. It saves them time and energy and removes a lot of pain points.

Gaia Castronovo, Education Localization Specialist at Arduino

For developers, the more versatile a tool is, the better. That’s why they expect their employers to provide tools that support a wide range of file extensions and integrations with other important systems that they use every day. Some of the most important Lokalise integrations that the three companies say their developers value above all include those with Bitbucket, Gmail, Android SDK, Webhooks, GitLab, and GitHub.

Eric Vu from Deliveree says that Lokalise checks all the right boxes for him: “The diversity of file extensions makes me really excited. I mean, I can upload Ruby files, and the mobile team can upload their files. And the file format is automatically regenerated when we export and import. It’s a great feature!”

Happy developers keep your business growing

As they continue to expand into new language markets, all three companies say that Lokalise is vital to their business expansion. It professionalizes their localization activities, saves time and costs, and keeps developers satisfied. 

The translation workflow using Lokalise improved our overall business performance.

Eric Vu, Backend Developer at Deliveree

More efficient workflows keep your developers motivated and engaged. Outdated, inefficient processes (like emailing spreadsheets or dumping files in a shared folder) have the opposite effect. 

I would recommend Lokalise to teams that have developers on board and especially to those who work with app development. The software will save you time, energy, and money, especially if you pay your developers hourly. If they can do the work faster, you’ll need less of their time and, therefore, will be able to save some expenses.

Gaia Castronovo, Education Localization Specialist at Arduino

With a happy DevOps team, you create a stronger foundation for your business to  grow. And that growth enables you to invest even more in building your team’s future, with better tools for them to use, and better financial incentives to attract and retain talent. The more your company invests in its development team, the better positioned it is to maintain success.