During my time at Expedia, I built and taught an in-person course for fellow product managers about internationalization.

Not globalization.

Not localization.

Not market expansion.

A very technical engineering discipline called internationalization (i18n for short) that, in short, makes it easy for the same code to be localized into country- and language-specific formats.

Sound boring? Depends on who you ask.

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The fun part, though, was traveling around with my manager Mark to different offices all over the world and giving this 3-hour interactive training to hundreds of PMs, TPMs and UX designers.

Between Seattle, Chicago, London and Delhi, we delivered that same course seventeen times.

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After a few turns at it, we had the delivery pretty much nailed down.

Still, each time seemed a bit different.

Each group had a different collective context, after all.

And while the questions we fielded were always related to the same general pillars, the way they were asked were always different.

Because, just like I say each of us has a unique lens on our domain…

Each attendee has a unique lens through which they were receiving what we were sharing.

And that’s what kept the teaching interesting, time and again.

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This morning, my friend and fractional CMO Erika Weiss and I took our “The Future is Fractional” talk to an impressive group of highly engaged women, all new or aspiring fractional executives.

We first gave this talk back in February, and even though our delivery was ~90% the same, it’s always fun to hear the new questions.

Today, they were great ones:

• How do you price fractional work aside from just converting an annual salary into an hourly rate? When do you use a retainer?
  • Expected that one.
• How should I think about adding ‘fractional’ to my LinkedIn page, even if I haven’t decided on that path or sold any fractional work?
  • Yup, we didn't cover that.
• How do you know when a role listed as fractional is actually just a full-time role without benefits?
  • Ok, now that's interesting - I've never heard of that happening.

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I’ll share our answers tomorrow, but today, I’m reminded that questions — from your audience, your prospects, or your clients — are feedback.

Feedback that tells you what you didn’t cover clearly, or cover at all.

Feedback that gives you a peek inside your audience’s priorities, problems, perhaps even fears.

And feedback that can inform how you can improve your message next time.

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💡

-Wes