The fundamentals of creating a website for a Global Company

I’m Ben Davies, and I work at Sinch as the Global Website Product Owner, based in Stockholm. I come from England and have lived and worked in a few countries previously, so I’d say that my identity is quite international. That’s probably why working at Sinch suits me quite well, it’s a diverse and global company. My responsibilities here include managing the strategy and roadmap of our website and driving our priority initiatives.

My career experience has mainly involved working at large companies with tens to hundreds of thousands of employees. I was attracted to Sinch because it’s an ambitious company that has been rapidly growing from a small Stockholm start-up to a global leader in its field, so I found it exciting to experience and contribute to this growth.

I also appreciate Sinch’s values. Before joining, I heard about two of them: Dream Big and Win Together.Sinch encourages employees to think ambitiously and focuses on the importance of teamwork. I’m glad to say everybody here lives by those values, you can really sense a great team spirit and culture, even in a company with teams across the globe.

Our website serves lots of different people, so it’s part of my job to build online experiences that resonate with the goals and needs of various website users. On the one hand, we have existing or potential customers who want to purchase or learn more about our product portfolio. On the other hand, we have jobseekers who want to apply to work at Sinch. There are some questions we need to cover: “What is Sinch? Which products do we offer? What are our values? How can you get in touch with us?” We need to make sure that we’re relevant for our website visitors and make it easy for people to engage with Sinch via our website.

When it comes to websites of this scale, one size fits nobody in today’s world. We cannot build experiences for just one type of customer, so prioritizing what to build in order to bring the most value to our Sinch teams and website users is a challenge that keeps our team busy. As a product leader, I often have to be ruthless with prioritization and I find that the best starting point is to listen more. Actively listening to customers and Sinchers with the aim of deeply understanding what they want to achieve through the website is important.

Then, I prioritize the work according to the effort and the impact that these needs are likely to have towards our growth strategy and/or our customer’s experience, so people feel listened to and know that our prioritization is fair. The next and ongoing step is to communicate around our roadmap and priorities to manage expectations as clearly as possible.

Our team aims to be data-driven in the way we plan our site improvements. We also look at user data from the website to determine if users are having successful experiences on the site and where improvements can be made. The favorite part of my job is speaking directly with customers and other types of website users. By having a conversation with a user whilst looking through the website together, I can better understand what they expect to achieve from visiting the site and if Sinch.com meets those expectations. Sometimes it’s not the fancy interactive features, but clean messaging and intuitive layout that helps our users the most.

One of the things I like the most about my role is that in a cloud communications company like Sinch the website is considered important for all people in all teams. Everyone has a stake on the website, and that allows me to speak with different teams and understand what’s going on throughout the business. I have to keep up to date on the strategy behind every product, the brand and the regions so that they’re well represented on the website. It’s the true reach across the business that I really appreciate about my role. Being the communication bridge between the web team and stakeholders internal and external to Sinch is part of my job — ensuring that the technical team members are aware of the business drivers behind what we do, and at the same time letting the business stakeholders understand the effort and complexity behind the experiences that we build on the website.

In my team, it feels like we’re juggling a hundred different things at once — which, personally, I think is a fun part of the job. The best part for me is that I’m always interacting with people from different parts of the world and different areas of Sinch, which I get a lot of energy from. Also, in Sweden we have the “Fika” culture: a coffee break moment for teams to gather and relax. One big takeaway from living here in Sweden, which is part of my daily life now, is the importance of taking time out of the day to have a coffee and have a chat. So, as a product leader, I make sure to keep our environment as human as possible, eventually breaking away from work demands and just focusing on connecting with people.

Finally, if I could leave a message for someone who’s joining Sinch: it’s likely that you’ll be busy in what we call the rocket ship of Sinch, it’s quite a wild ride, especially since we’re growing so much as a company. The good thing is we’re always trying to have fun at the same time. Our CEO, Oscar Werner, said once: “We take our work seriously, but not ourselves…” And you will see that many Sinchers try to live by that statement at work.

Interested to learn more about Sinch and perhaps become a part of our team? Check out our Careers page!