Collective Accelerates Bilingual Shipping with Prismy

With approximately 10 features deployed weekly, Collective saves around 4 hours per week—equivalent to half a workday!‍

About Collective‍

Collective is the new professional network where freelancers and recruiters/clients can find each other for 0% commission.

It also provides the infrastructure for freelancers to form teams (called "collectives") and manage invoicing (both individually and collectively).

From day one, Collective has embraced an international approach, designing not only the product but also internal processes to support a globally diverse team, where employees may not speak the headquarters' local language.

Languages and International Reach‍

From the outset, Collective aimed to be available in both French (their local language) and English to explore potential traction in other markets. While the majority of their business is still based in France, internationalizing Collective has provided valuable insights into freelancer locations and potential emerging markets. Though most of their freelancers are in France, a significant portion comes from Europe and beyond.‍‍

Localization Challenges Before Prismy‍

Initially, Collective lacked an interface for translation changes, resorting to copy-pasting wording suggestions from their product manager into the code.

They quickly implemented a localization software, but it had limitations:

• Poor integration with GitHub, leading to numerous conflicts
• User-unfriendly interface that cost the product team valuable time‍

Beyond ensuring product availability in both English and French, Collective faced the complex task of global freelancer verification, which they managed by developing their own solution.‍‍

Continuous Localization Process‍

Collective's typical process involves:

1. Designing and coding features in English
2. Near development completion, the developer notifies the Product Manager (PM) to start translation
3. The PM accesses a dedicated environment to test the new feature and manage translations‍

Prismy streamlines this process by:

• Automatically detecting translation needs in pull requests
• Sending Slack notifications to alert the team
• Allowing translators to manage the translations directly in Prismy
• Generating high-quality AI pre-translations, significantly saving time‍

A key benefit of Prismy is its ability to handle collaboration directly on feature branches. PMs can make wording changes and translations within Prismy, committing them straight to the developer branch. These changes are instantly reflected in the test environment, making the process nearly seamless. ‍‍

Integration of Prismy‍‍

Despite having experience with other localization tools, Prismy stood out for its simplicity, particularly as a GitHub App. The integration process was straightforward:

1. Add Prismy to the repository
2. That's it!‍

Prismy worked seamlessly with Collective's JavaScript-based stack (Node.js and React) without requiring any customizations.‍‍

Time Savings with Prismy‍‍‍

Localization is a daily task for Collective as they ship numerous features. Prismy has significantly reduced the time spent on:

• translating, the AI translation of Prismy is fast and qualitative
• eliminating manual file sharing or copy-pasting between teams‍

Before Prismy:

• Total time per feature: ~30 minutes
  • Developer: 5 minutes sharing files + defocus time
  • PM: 15 minutes making changes
  • PM: 5 minutes notifying developer + defocus time
  • Developer: 5 minutes integrating changes

With Prismy:

• Total time per feature: 5 minutes or less (sometimes as little as 1 minute)

Time saved: ~25 minutes per feature‍. With approximately 10 features deployed weekly, Collective saves around 4 hours per week—equivalent to half a workday!