When to hire a head of localization, and when to use an LSP instead
Use an LSP when you need production capacity. Hire a head of localization when you need someone to decide what gets produced. The trigger is not volume — it is the point at which localization decisions start affecting product and engineering roadmaps, which a supplier cannot own from outside.
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Should we hire a head of localization or outsource to an LSP?
They solve different problems and the question is usually miscast as either-or. An LSP provides production capacity: linguists, project management, tooling and scale, available immediately and priced per unit of work. A head of localization provides ownership: market prioritization, budget control, quality standards and internal advocacy.
Most companies need both. What they get wrong is the order and the timing — either hiring a senior owner before there is anything to own, or leaving a supplier to make strategic decisions the supplier has no standing to make.
What does an LSP do well?
Capacity, coverage and immediacy. A competent LSP can deliver dozens of language pairs, absorb volume spikes, provide subject-matter specialists you would never hire directly, and start next week rather than next quarter.
They are also the right answer for uneven demand. Carrying permanent headcount for work that arrives in bursts is expensive, and vendors exist precisely to convert that fixed cost into a variable one.
What can an LSP not do?
An LSP cannot prioritize your markets against your revenue, because it does not see your revenue. It cannot decide which content deserves human quality and which does not, because that trade-off is yours. It cannot argue internally for engineering time to fix internationalization defects, because it has no standing in your planning process.
Most consequentially, an LSP is structurally not positioned to tell you to buy less. Vendors are paid for volume; the advice that saves the most money is usually to translate less content, better.
What signals mean you need an internal owner?
The trigger is decision frequency, not spend.
- Product decisions are being blocked
- Engineering is asking internationalization questions and nobody internal can answer them authoritatively.
- Market requests are arriving from multiple directions
- Sales, partnerships and marketing each want different languages and there is no basis for choosing.
- Quality complaints have no owner
- Something ships badly, the vendor is blamed, and no one internal can say what the standard was supposed to be.
- Vendor spend is growing without a plan
- Cost is rising, nobody can explain the trend, and there is no model connecting it to outcomes.
- You are being asked what the AI plan is
- Leadership wants to know what machine translation changes for cost and headcount. A vendor's answer to that question is not disinterested.
What should the first internal hire look like?
For most companies, a hands-on senior manager rather than a director. The first hire has to run delivery and own strategy at the same time, and a candidate who has only done the second will struggle in a function with no team beneath them.
The exception is a company where the localization decision is genuinely strategic from the outset — a regulated product, or a market entry that the company's growth depends on. There, hiring a director-level owner early is justified because the decisions being made are that expensive.
Can you run both?
Almost everyone does, and the hybrid is usually right: an internal owner who sets strategy, defines quality and manages the supply base, with vendors providing production capacity underneath.
The version that fails is an internal team that reproduces what the vendor already does well. If your in-house function is mostly coordinating translation, you have hired production capacity at permanent-headcount prices.