Why APAC Requests Keep Sliding Down the Product Backlog
If you’ve worked in Asia under a western company setting up their offices here in Asia especially as part of the commercial team, you might noticed that requests from APAC (Asia-Pacific) customers tend to not get prioritised very often. Features, fixes and improvements tend to be shaped around customers in North America and EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa), while APAC requests sit in the backlog, the queue of work waiting to be built, often indefinitely.
I’ve seen this from both sides. As a product manager with global responsibility, I helped decide which requests made it into the next release. As a solutions engineer, I’ve been the one explaining to a customer why their request is still in the backlog. Nobody sets out to overlook a region. It mostly comes down to how requests get scored.
How the scoring works against APAC
Many product teams rank requests using a handful of factors, and one of them is usually commercial weight: the annual recurring revenue (ARR) of the customer asking, or the size of the deal tied to the request. In my experience, APAC customers as a whole tend to have smaller budgets than customers in North America and EMEA, with the gap widest against the US. The region isn’t uniform, of course. Australia and New Zealand tend to have bigger budgets, though they are also more prone to time zone issues around support and data that I’ll get to below. Japan’s economy is large, but with the yen weak against the dollar, budgets there look smaller once converted, and that shows up directly in the score if ARR is counted in dollars.
Put an APAC request next to one from a large US account and the US request usually wins. The APAC one goes to the backlog and, unless customers in North America or EMEA have asked for the same thing, it tends to stay there.
Then a loop starts. When customers see their requests go nowhere, their interest fades. Deal sizes in APAC shrink, and so does the overall customer base, while North America and EMEA keep getting what they ask for and keep growing. The next round of scoring is even more lopsided. Over time the region diminishes. No single decision in that chain looks unreasonable, which is why it’s hard to spot from the inside.
Investing in people, not in the product
What makes this strange is that the same companies talk about APAC as a market with huge opportunity. They open offices here and hire people to serve it. Yet the product itself still tends to be built with North American and EMEA customers in mind, in the features it gets and the support behind it.
Cloud integrations show it well. AWS, Google Cloud and Azure come with a huge number of plugins and connectors. Alibaba Cloud and Tencent Cloud are gaining traction across APAC too, but in my experience they rarely get the same level of support for the reasons above.
Small gaps that add up
Sometimes the gap is as simple as language: a product or its documentation that only exists in English. Other times it shows up in the data.
Say a data product refreshes once a day at 07:00 UTC. For a team in Europe or North America, the new data is ready by the start of the working day, or shortly after. In Singapore, 07:00 UTC is 3pm, so an analyst opening the dashboard at 9am is looking at data refreshed about 18 hours earlier. It’s harder still further south and east. In Sydney the refresh lands at 5pm or 6pm, depending on daylight saving, and in Auckland at 7pm or 8pm. Those teams may have the bigger budgets, but the new data doesn’t arrive until their working day is over, so they’re always working from yesterday’s refresh. The refresh time made sense for North America and Europe, so it stayed that way.
What I’d like to see
If a company wants a real presence in APAC, hiring people here is only part of the job. It has to listen more to APAC customers, and make product decisions on more than the dollars available today.
Much of APAC is growing because it is still developing, and that is where its value lies: more in the future than in the present. A scoring model that only counts current revenue will always undercount it. So when an APAC request comes in, weigh it as though the region has already grown into the market it’s becoming.
All opinions and perspectives expressed here are solely my own and do not represent the views of my current or past employers.