As you expand your engineering, product and design team, consider language and cultural knowledge as part of the hiring process.

Many software developers are bilingual, so keep an eye out for people who speak languages that are relevant to the regions you may expand to in the future. While you won’t necessarily want them to translate your app, they will play a vital role in making sure your app functions well in the languages they speak.

Beyond translation, there are a lot of subtle functional issues that arise in non-English languages that are easily missed. Database sort order, filters, data imports, and layout issues are examples. They often don’t cause outright failures, but are an annoyance to users that cause an app to look janky.

While it is generally illegal to consider a candidate’s nationality in hiring, it is okay to consider language skills in the hiring process. “Hard” languages like Japanese are especially valuable. People who speak right to left languages like Arabic and Hebrew are also great hires as they can help refactor the app to work well in languages that have different text orientation and design conventions.

Bilingual developers are often passionate about accessibility and will be champions for making the product excel in their languages. This makes the difference between a product that was lazily translated into yet another interface language and one that feels like it was built by and for people in that language.