Erik on product management and such
UX Scorecards: A method for scaling global products
Imagine you’re responsible for a major part of the purchase flow at an e-commerce platform that’s rapidly expanding into new markets, not just a few per year, but 30 new markets in the past two or three years. And they’re not just North America and the numerous European markets, but North America and Europe, plus the diverse markets in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Russia, and Latin America.
You know that to hit your goals the user experience in these diverse locales needs to be without major blockers, otherwise it will hurt the growth of the entire company.
To help with ensuring the UX meets the expectations of users in the many new locales, the company has set up local teams and counterparts to you that may be called Product Localization or some variation thereof, and they’re now telling you all about how many points of friction there are in their market.
You might say that this should solve the problem, but far from it. Product Localization can deal with things like payment options that should be supported, legalese and translations. But much of the time, what they bring up is issues in the core UX: the filters are hard to use, I don’t understand the search ranking and ordering, I can’t tell what the final price is, etc.
In fact, you’ve just created a massive set of new problems - every week, another person from an office around the world brings up another issues with the filters. We’re currently doing A, but they think approach B might be better. You start looking into it, and next week feedback arrives that a C approach would be better in that market. Someone suggests approach D, which is actually what we had before the current approach A. Are we going in circles? Are people just complaining for the sake of it? How many of these are local needs, and how many of them should be understood as feedback on the global UX level?
Moreover, your leadership team wants to make sure your making use of these feedback sets, and they also want you to present clear solutions.
This is exactly the role I’ve been in for the past several years; in fact, I’ve been building and launching products for global markets from China HQ for the past decade. The method I built to solve this is the UX Scorecard, and by doing so I apparently reinvented the wheel, because there’s plenty of other resources on how and why to use this method.
If you take the scorecards one step further and aggregate the painpoints, validate their occurrence across locales as a global phenomena, you can create aggregated Problem Statements, and the beauty of that is, you can pull in all the related teams and define solutions to wide-ranging issues very quickly. The final result can look something like this:
This is why implementing UX scorecards is like installing a global satellite network over several individual weather stations; instead of getting isolated reports of rain in one city and wondering if the whole world needs an umbrella, the scorecard gives you a clear, real-time map of the entire planet, allowing you to deploy the right resources exactly where they are needed most.
What you’ll also realize is that when you’re managing global products, UX scorecards are not just a way to improve the user experience, but a way to re-engineer the organization in a fundamental way.
Here, I’ll go through the method and its significant positive impact on UX strategy, HQ-to-regional working relationships, and leadership communication.
The Foundational Framework: G11n, i18n, and l10n
Scaling products for international markets amplifies the foundational challenge of product management: knowing exactly what to build. When users in different regions have conflicting expectations alongside shared preferences, building a global product is not simply about translation; it is about first understanding what is common across locales and, only then, what is different.
Successful global product management requires absolute clarity on three distinct layers that build upon one another.
• Globalization (G11n) is the overarching business strategy—the "why" and "where" of entering markets and managing global operations. This is also where the core product is built as a single experience that is offered in every market.
• Internationalization (i18n) is the engineering layer; it involves designing software to be adaptable to various languages and regions without code changes. This makes the core product responsive to local needs where it needs to be.
• Localization (l10n) is the adaptation layer, where an internationalized product is customized with translated text and local date formats, expected payment options, legalese etc., to feel native to a specific user segment.
Maintaining this separation is crucial for scalability. A common failure occurs when a localized UX requirement is confused with a global one, leading to "decision limbo" where projects are debated for months without a clear path forward.
Identifying Anti-Patterns in UX Feedback
This strategic limbo is often caused by two specific "anti-patterns"—recurring traps that initially seem like quick fixes but lead to long-term inefficiency.
1. The Unstructured Feedback Trap: Feedback arrives from a single locale in varied formats. For a product manager, manually determining if these issues generalize to other markets becomes overwhelming, leading to guesswork or inaction.
2. The Incentive Misalignment: Local teams are often incentivized to identify "problems," leading them to propose alternative solutions based on local preference rather than validated global friction.Without a tool to categorize this input, organizations risk implementing local preferences at a global scale, making the product unsuitable for other international markets.
III. The Solution: The Global UX Scorecard Methodology
The UX scorecard method provides the structured, comparable feedback needed to break through this limbo. It achieves four key goals:
• It provides a glanceable, comparable overview of pain points across all locales in seconds.
• It enables deep, contextual investigation by allowing PMs to drill down into exact recorded user journeys.
• It offers competitive benchmarking to see how regional competitors handle the same scenarios.
• It operates at a global scale, delivering insights for all target locales—such as the EU, US, and various Asian markets—simultaneously.
IV. Step-by-Step Implementation
The process begins with localization specialists defining critical scenarios and recording user journeys for the product and its competitors. Next, color-coded scorecards are generated to signal which experience is superior based on standardized metrics like success rates, ease of use, and usability. Finally, the organization aggregates global insights from 10+ locales to identify frequently occurring common pain points, allowing HQ teams to work autonomously with a clearly defined direction.
V. Measuring Success: The Global Farecard Case Study
The power of this methodology was demonstrated during the Global Farecard UX project. By applying scorecards across all key markets, the team turned subjective feedback into aggregate, objective data. This allowed the team to instantly validate a global issue: users everywhere struggled to distinguish between fare benefits. The resulting improvements led to a 41.4% increase in the upsell rate, generating over 100 million RMB in added annual revenue.
VI. Communicating to Stakeholders: The One-Page "Work Order"
For a PM, the true "magic" of the UX scorecard is that it is a rare artifact that speaks the language of the product team and the executive suite at the same time. While product teams need the granular, task-level data found in a 30-page report, leadership requires an "insights-forward" summary they will actually consume.In my practice, I’ve found that the most effective way to lead a presentation is to use the red, yellow, and green scorecard as the preface slide. It acts as a one-page "work order" that provides a clear, "5th-grade level" summary of the product’s health right up front. By using a school essay metaphor—grading experiences from A (delightful) to F (actively sabotaging users)—you eliminate the ability for anyone to pretend a mediocre experience is fine. The depth is always available for those who want to dig into the metrics, but the scorecard ensures that everyone leaves the room agreeing on the "so what" and the priorities for the next sprint.
VII. Conclusion
UX scorecards have transformed global product management by replacing "navigating by gut" with systematic quantification. By tracking standardized metrics like SUS, SEQ, and UMUX-Lite, organizations can prove the ROI of their research and ensure their global strategy remains consistent yet effectively localized.