July 16, 2025 • 21 mins
International trade is high-stakes, high-impact work—and BAs are at the centre of how governments support their exporters and grow economies. In this episode, I share 10 essential things every BA needs to understand if you're working in a trade agency, export business, or supporting businesses going global.
From cross-border data constraints to stakeholder diplomacy and exporter experience, this is your BA map for global impact.
🎧 Hit play and get international.
#BA #BusinessAnalysis #Business
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
I had the privilege of working inside NZTE New Zealand Trade
and Enterprise, the government department that's exists to help
New Zealand export products overseas and so they have BDMS
around the world, business development managers who sell,
help sell products and read run trade shows.
(00:23):
They're usually based on embassies all around the world,
and they have customer managers in New Zealand who manage
customers and they have different tiers of businesses
that they help in various ways. And I want to pull back the
curtain on what the world of international trade looks like
(00:45):
from AB. As perspective.
This is a sector where digital systems meet diplomacy and
success isn't about profit. It's about national growth, GDP,
global partnerships, The Better Business Analysis Institute
presence, the Better Business Analysis podcast with Kingsman
(01:06):
Walsh and supporting exporters to fly the flag overseas.
Here are 10 things every BA should know if you're stepping
into the trade, export or international business space.
(01:27):
We're talking about 10 things every BA should know about the
trade, export and international business space.
We're going to be counting down the top 10 here.
Number one is you're not just supporting a business, you're
actually supporting a country. And I thought this was a
relevant talking point because of a lot of the tariffs that are
(01:48):
happening in America at the moment and what that effect
might have on business. And just understanding a little
bit more around how this export and import works might be a
little bit of a tip bit or interesting for some of you out
there. So trade agencies, in this case
the New Zealand Trading entity, but it could be any place around
(02:11):
the world. They service or they work with
exports and they also serve national interest.
Every system, tool or process can influence your country's
brand reputation and economic performance.
So an example here might be thata small UI change that you're
(02:34):
helping implement about how exporters feedback, right?
How that, how that's captured ends up influencing ministerial
reporting on export sentiment, which is really important
because it will get to probably a minister's level of it will
get minister's visibility. And and that's important because
(02:58):
this is where the biggest measure of economic value is
measured, which is your GDP, your gross domestic product.
ABA tip here is always ask how does this help New Zealand Inc
or USA Inc or Mexico Inc? Your solution needs to serve the
(03:19):
individual exporter and the broader economic narrative that
your countries are coming up with.
So I'm just going to go off on aside tangent here.
At the moment, a lot of manufacturers in the US, they're
being encouraged to move the offshore manufacturing into the
(03:40):
US, but it's very difficult to do that because they source
products from all around the world because we're in a near
liberal economic open free market society.
And so some of those people thatimport the reverse of export
here are feeling the pain. So I want you this, this
perspective, we're looking as the exporters, the other ones
(04:00):
who are trying to get in to America, right, might be China
with the goods they're exportinggoods.
You may not think about that. You may think about it in the US
as importing the goods. But there's, it's the other side
of the balance sheet, right? So #2 is the fact that the
stakeholders, as we've just talked about, are global and
(04:22):
they're diverse. Your user spans time zones,
cultures, languages and industry.
From food and fibre to SAS to high manufacturing, value
manufacturing or chips, for example, AI chips at the moment
as a hot topic or raw materials,but precious metals is a
(04:46):
geopolitical hot topic at the moment.
Personas can include the exporters, the offshore business
development managers, the government officials and more.
And and as I said, there's that key importer who's using those
products. An example here is that you
might be gathering requirements for ACRM enhancement.
(05:10):
Actually, I was doing this and the needs of the trade
Commissioner in Singapore, the trade Commissioners.
So they usually call them commissioners and the embassy in
Singapore differs massively frommaybe the multi AG business
advisor in Gizmo New Zealand. So the customer who's trying to
(05:32):
export. And so the the fact is a
cultural difference there. You need to bridge that gap.
So the BA tip here is that you need to build globally inclusive
personas right early. This is not around making sure
you do using diversity in the workplace.
This is literally the fact that you have diverse customers.
(05:55):
You can't ignore this. You need to test assumptions
with offshore staff and figure out what those cultural diverse
teams know about their market. This is so important in where
people get things wrong and theycan actually insult whole market
because they're not doing thingsthe way in which that culture
(06:16):
would expect business to be run.OK, this whole tricks here, this
tricks around, I know around thefact South Korea, they've got a
big drinking culture and a lot of business has done around
doing your business relationships.
And in some cases this is a total generalization, but in
some businesses it's about getting drunk, singing karaoke.
(06:37):
That's part of the business relationship.
So you've just got to be really clear that you know what you're
getting yourself in for. Number 3 is that business
success is measured differently.So not everything is around
return on investment, immediate return on investment as it would
be in your close market in your country.
(06:59):
Success can be longer term, likebreaking into a market, right?
First market entry, you know, being the first person to export
New Zealand product like peanut butter is a major export for us.
It sounds really weird, but we make premium peanut butter here,
even though we might, I'm not sure where the peanuts actually
come from. And it's broken into the US
(07:20):
market massively because it's totally different to what craft
or one of the big manufacturers in the US provide.
So it's one of the customs we had at New Zealand Trade
Enterprise. It's all around strategic
partnerships for long term and it's about capability uplift.
So your analysis needs to support intangible KPIs.
(07:42):
That's, that's the, the key point here.
An example might be you're building a digital tool for
export readiness, right? So it's, it's showing that the
customer that you're dealing with onshore your, your country
is ready to export and maybe it doesn't generate revenue
(08:03):
directly, but it helps 500 businesses into export markets
within a year. So you're not measuring the the
amount of money made by those exporters, you're measuring that
you have helped 500 businesses be able to export to markets.
Does that make sense? Because you're that middle,
(08:26):
you're that middle person, you're you're the ones who are
helping facilitate the relationship. the BA tip here
is, when framing benefits, consider strategic outcomes
really important, not just efficiency gains or dollar
figures #4 is that everything has a political dimension so
(08:46):
tightly coupled in the import export market.
Export promotion is tied to government policy, trade
agreements, and international diplomacy.
Anything you build or change mayneed to withstand ministerial
scrutiny and may unfairly be biased because you, I don't
(09:07):
know, you're based in China and you're manufacturing something
and then everyone's suspicious that the Chinese government has
baked in some, you know, spying software into your product.
That happens all, all the time. Vice versa happens, you know,
maybe more covertly from the US doing that or Israel or what
not. An example here is that you
(09:30):
propose a change to an export onboarding workflow, right?
Getting exporters onboard and the minister of your area or
government official, if it's if you don't have ministers where
you're from, wants assurance that it won't exclude smaller
regional players, for example, because at the moment the
(09:51):
government internally is searching for votes from small
regional players. OK.
And that's actually the case in New Zealand at the moment. the
BA tip here is just anticipate there's going to be a political
lens across this. Be ready to back up your
analysis with quality, regional impact, exclusions,
(10:13):
transparency. They're really important #5 is
that systems must flex for many markets.
So A1 size fits all platform really works.
You're designing for different levels of digital maturity,
infrastructure and privacy regimes, which is so true.
(10:35):
And from the West and East and West kind of geopolitical ties
we have at the moment, you need to have cross-border data
compliance and it's real. So you've got, you know, the
GDPRI think it's cool and the PDPA, you know, if you have a
website, for example, in the UK,the cold cookies, accepting
(10:56):
cookies is mandatory. That isn't the case in New
Zealand and I don't think it is in the US.
An example here is that a New Deal management tool works fine
in New Zealand, but it has legaland usability issues in China
due to data sovereignty laws. That's so true.
And that goes for infrastructuretoo.
So I'll give you a tip and then I'll I'll give you a story.
(11:19):
Always include international compliance and localization
factors in your scope analysis. And when I worked at New Zealand
training enterprise, we had a Syrian system customized for our
both our BDMS and our customers mainly focused on the customers
in New Zealand, but the BDMS would use it and even accessing
(11:41):
that system, which was a global running on global SAS was a
mission from an infrastructure point of view in places like
China. So we had to you know, and
making it secure because this was sensitive information and
really this was sensitive information that could easily be
accessed is not secure. So we had to do some very, so
(12:03):
they had to be some very tight kind of VPN secure network which
which then had an impact on performance of the solution we
were providing. So you just got to be careful
about that. Number six is that relationship
management is everything. Trade is built on trust systems
(12:23):
that support relation, relationship visibility,
continuity and context. Gold.
So if someone is picking up a BDM moves on and then another
BDM comes in and they're workingin let's say Canada, it's they
need to know what the relationships were and you're
dealing with the, you know, the,all the Canadian officials and
(12:45):
you're exporting from the US to Canada.
Well, you need to understand thecontext, you need to understand
the relationships. The CRM side actually capturing
all interactions in one place isso important and your role is to
enable strategic human connections, not just
transactional relationships. OK, so I think more like a a
doctor then maybe going to your mechanic.
(13:09):
An example here is that you needto improve, or you are working
on improving a contact history tracking for offshore staff,
your BDMS. And then suddenly when they need
to prep for meeting with exporters, they maybe haven't
seen these people for ages, but they can go back into the system
(13:30):
and see like years of history, 10 years of history as a game
changer. And that matters.
It's like, oh, well, you know, Ispoke to Max and well, my
predecessor spoke to Max in 22, you know, and this was a
conversation he had and apparently it was really good.
And there was some some great conversations about how we can
help each other, blah, blah, blah. the BA tip is to
(13:51):
prioritize features that you're building that improve trust,
building transparency and continuity in stakeholder
journeys. So what I'm saying here is
repositories of information is, is very key.
And, and getting people to log those transactions is key, which
is a challenge. 7 is you'll be dealing with fuzzy problems.
(14:12):
Many initiatives don't have a tidy process map.
You're often dealing with emerging needs, pilots,
experimental programs, thinking off the cuff.
That's the people that survive in these roles overseas.
And ambiguity is the norm. OK, so you need to just you
can't just have a rigid process.Say it is an example.
(14:35):
We want to help expose exporters, tell their
sustainability story better, right?
What does that mean? You'll need to help figure that
out. You need to use maybe design
thinking and lean canvas techniques to shape the loosely
defined initiatives into BA ready problems that you can then
solve and have ideas. Localization, small, small
(15:02):
customizations with a small C, so you customize or you can on
the fly work dynamically #8 is that data drives narrative, not
just operations. So the agency reports to
government, right? And stakeholders are using data
(15:23):
to tell success stories. This means that dashboards
aren't operational. Dashboards are things, you know,
working well. What's the numbers?
Are we going up and down in revenue?
They are political and they are strategic.
Maybe you're working on a reporting enhancement for an
offshore team that's in another country and it's for their
(15:45):
activity feeds, right? That of what they're doing and
those conversations and the tagsand all the kind of soft
metadata that could feed into anannual report to Parliament or
to your government, the Congressor the Senate. the BA tip here
is treat data visualization and insight generation as part of
(16:06):
your analysis toolkit and is notpost project fluff.
It is may need to think about itfrom that angle 1st and you do
that sometimes with reporting projects anyway.
But this might be, you might have an extra layer on top of
that because the data that you're using isn't just constant
of data that you're collecting. It's also stories tags, you
(16:33):
know, really strange data pointsaround political influence and
things like that. So you really need to think
about that upfront and what do you stake owners want?
And that's what does the minister want.
And that, you know, for example,if you're feeding to a minister
and maybe one of your points is the fact that businesses aren't
getting to see our BDM's, aren'tgetting to see the higher ups in
(16:56):
a country, you know, for trade conversations, maybe the
minister of that particular area, they then go overseas and
meet the higher ups. And that's generally how it
works. And so your data needs to show
that, right? No amount of revenue figures
going to indicate that. Number 9, which is tricky, is
(17:18):
time zones and tools are part ofthe problem.
So collaboration isn't simple when your team spans Wellington,
New Zealand, Singapore, San Francisco and Berlin.
So tools, platforms and BA artifacts need to work async
across different tech stacks that work overseas or on a SAS
(17:40):
system that manages that for you.
An example might be your workflow design needs to assume
that staff may only touch a toolonce a week, not daily.
OK. And that's difficult for
capturing notes. So maybe you know your, all your
all these places we just talked about Singapore, San Francisco
and Berlin. You're trying to get one product
(18:02):
from New Zealand into those three places, right?
And you've got three different BEMS, but you want to feed that
information back and give your customer some insights.
And maybe you have to wait a week to get those notes through.
So you have to think about all the tools they use and are they
going to work in the centre you're working in?
If you're working in the middle of Africa, it's going to be
(18:24):
quite different all the rest of it, right?
And so it's not all coming in atnicely between 9:00 and 5:00 in
New Zealand time. It's, you know, the Americans, a
lot of Americans listen to this podcast.
Your later in the day is when you start work.
So the BA tip is to design for async clarity, record decisions
(18:45):
well, use templates and frameworks that travel well
across distance and different languages because it may be best
to capture your notes in the native tongue of that country.
Because context is key. And to be honest, the world is
is littered with examples where translation has caused problems.
(19:08):
And #10 is that exporters are hustling.
So respect their time. Your user quote, UN quote may be
a founder wearing 10 hats building a brand shipping
containers at midnight. If a digital solution that
you're working on waste their time, it'll die or get bad
(19:30):
feedback, right? An example is if you're building
a new tool for funding applications that they're
getting some funding from the government and it fails because
it requires too much manual entry.
The exporters will just bail after page two.
OK, and they won't they won't use you as a trade engine and
then maybe go direct or they'll use another.
(19:50):
They'll just, you know, start selling on Amazon, right?
And hope that that's a strategy,which is not a bad strategy,
depending on your company. the VA tip here is always test with
real exporters, not just internal proxies.
Simplify, remove friction ruthlessly.
It's got to be simple, OK, Don'task the same question twice.
(20:11):
Put their name in. You know all that kind of double
dudder entries is a no no. The international trade and
export sector is like an orchestra.
It's diplomatic, digital, deeplyhuman all at once.
As ABA, your role isn't just about optimizing workflows.
(20:34):
It's about helping businesses thrive on the world stage.
If you've got a global mindset and a sharp eye for strategy,
there's a lot of meaningful workto be done in this space.
If this resonated with you, please share it with another BA
or a mate at NZTU and subscribe for more episodes across other
(20:58):
sectors. And as always, keep asking great
questions.
I had the privilege of working inside NZTE New Zealand Trade
and Enterprise, the government department that's exists to help
New Zealand export products overseas and so they have BDMS
around the world, business development managers who sell,
help sell products and read run trade shows.
(00:23):
They're usually based on embassies all around the world,
and they have customer managers in New Zealand who manage
customers and they have different tiers of businesses
that they help in various ways. And I want to pull back the
curtain on what the world of international trade looks like
(00:45):
from AB. As perspective.
This is a sector where digital systems meet diplomacy and
success isn't about profit. It's about national growth, GDP,
global partnerships, The Better Business Analysis Institute
presence, the Better Business Analysis podcast with Kingsman
(01:06):
Walsh and supporting exporters to fly the flag overseas.
Here are 10 things every BA should know if you're stepping
into the trade, export or international business space.
(01:27):
We're talking about 10 things every BA should know about the
trade, export and international business space.
We're going to be counting down the top 10 here.
Number one is you're not just supporting a business, you're
actually supporting a country. And I thought this was a
relevant talking point because of a lot of the tariffs that are
(01:48):
happening in America at the moment and what that effect
might have on business. And just understanding a little
bit more around how this export and import works might be a
little bit of a tip bit or interesting for some of you out
there. So trade agencies, in this case
the New Zealand Trading entity, but it could be any place around
(02:11):
the world. They service or they work with
exports and they also serve national interest.
Every system, tool or process can influence your country's
brand reputation and economic performance.
So an example here might be thata small UI change that you're
(02:34):
helping implement about how exporters feedback, right?
How that, how that's captured ends up influencing ministerial
reporting on export sentiment, which is really important
because it will get to probably a minister's level of it will
get minister's visibility. And and that's important because
(02:58):
this is where the biggest measure of economic value is
measured, which is your GDP, your gross domestic product.
ABA tip here is always ask how does this help New Zealand Inc
or USA Inc or Mexico Inc? Your solution needs to serve the
(03:19):
individual exporter and the broader economic narrative that
your countries are coming up with.
So I'm just going to go off on aside tangent here.
At the moment, a lot of manufacturers in the US, they're
being encouraged to move the offshore manufacturing into the
(03:40):
US, but it's very difficult to do that because they source
products from all around the world because we're in a near
liberal economic open free market society.
And so some of those people thatimport the reverse of export
here are feeling the pain. So I want you this, this
perspective, we're looking as the exporters, the other ones
(04:00):
who are trying to get in to America, right, might be China
with the goods they're exportinggoods.
You may not think about that. You may think about it in the US
as importing the goods. But there's, it's the other side
of the balance sheet, right? So #2 is the fact that the
stakeholders, as we've just talked about, are global and
(04:22):
they're diverse. Your user spans time zones,
cultures, languages and industry.
From food and fibre to SAS to high manufacturing, value
manufacturing or chips, for example, AI chips at the moment
as a hot topic or raw materials,but precious metals is a
(04:46):
geopolitical hot topic at the moment.
Personas can include the exporters, the offshore business
development managers, the government officials and more.
And and as I said, there's that key importer who's using those
products. An example here is that you
might be gathering requirements for ACRM enhancement.
(05:10):
Actually, I was doing this and the needs of the trade
Commissioner in Singapore, the trade Commissioners.
So they usually call them commissioners and the embassy in
Singapore differs massively frommaybe the multi AG business
advisor in Gizmo New Zealand. So the customer who's trying to
(05:32):
export. And so the the fact is a
cultural difference there. You need to bridge that gap.
So the BA tip here is that you need to build globally inclusive
personas right early. This is not around making sure
you do using diversity in the workplace.
This is literally the fact that you have diverse customers.
(05:55):
You can't ignore this. You need to test assumptions
with offshore staff and figure out what those cultural diverse
teams know about their market. This is so important in where
people get things wrong and theycan actually insult whole market
because they're not doing thingsthe way in which that culture
(06:16):
would expect business to be run.OK, this whole tricks here, this
tricks around, I know around thefact South Korea, they've got a
big drinking culture and a lot of business has done around
doing your business relationships.
And in some cases this is a total generalization, but in
some businesses it's about getting drunk, singing karaoke.
(06:37):
That's part of the business relationship.
So you've just got to be really clear that you know what you're
getting yourself in for. Number 3 is that business
success is measured differently.So not everything is around
return on investment, immediate return on investment as it would
be in your close market in your country.
(06:59):
Success can be longer term, likebreaking into a market, right?
First market entry, you know, being the first person to export
New Zealand product like peanut butter is a major export for us.
It sounds really weird, but we make premium peanut butter here,
even though we might, I'm not sure where the peanuts actually
come from. And it's broken into the US
(07:20):
market massively because it's totally different to what craft
or one of the big manufacturers in the US provide.
So it's one of the customs we had at New Zealand Trade
Enterprise. It's all around strategic
partnerships for long term and it's about capability uplift.
So your analysis needs to support intangible KPIs.
(07:42):
That's, that's the, the key point here.
An example might be you're building a digital tool for
export readiness, right? So it's, it's showing that the
customer that you're dealing with onshore your, your country
is ready to export and maybe it doesn't generate revenue
(08:03):
directly, but it helps 500 businesses into export markets
within a year. So you're not measuring the the
amount of money made by those exporters, you're measuring that
you have helped 500 businesses be able to export to markets.
Does that make sense? Because you're that middle,
(08:26):
you're that middle person, you're you're the ones who are
helping facilitate the relationship. the BA tip here
is, when framing benefits, consider strategic outcomes
really important, not just efficiency gains or dollar
figures #4 is that everything has a political dimension so
(08:46):
tightly coupled in the import export market.
Export promotion is tied to government policy, trade
agreements, and international diplomacy.
Anything you build or change mayneed to withstand ministerial
scrutiny and may unfairly be biased because you, I don't
(09:07):
know, you're based in China and you're manufacturing something
and then everyone's suspicious that the Chinese government has
baked in some, you know, spying software into your product.
That happens all, all the time. Vice versa happens, you know,
maybe more covertly from the US doing that or Israel or what
not. An example here is that you
(09:30):
propose a change to an export onboarding workflow, right?
Getting exporters onboard and the minister of your area or
government official, if it's if you don't have ministers where
you're from, wants assurance that it won't exclude smaller
regional players, for example, because at the moment the
(09:51):
government internally is searching for votes from small
regional players. OK.
And that's actually the case in New Zealand at the moment. the
BA tip here is just anticipate there's going to be a political
lens across this. Be ready to back up your
analysis with quality, regional impact, exclusions,
(10:13):
transparency. They're really important #5 is
that systems must flex for many markets.
So A1 size fits all platform really works.
You're designing for different levels of digital maturity,
infrastructure and privacy regimes, which is so true.
(10:35):
And from the West and East and West kind of geopolitical ties
we have at the moment, you need to have cross-border data
compliance and it's real. So you've got, you know, the
GDPRI think it's cool and the PDPA, you know, if you have a
website, for example, in the UK,the cold cookies, accepting
(10:56):
cookies is mandatory. That isn't the case in New
Zealand and I don't think it is in the US.
An example here is that a New Deal management tool works fine
in New Zealand, but it has legaland usability issues in China
due to data sovereignty laws. That's so true.
And that goes for infrastructuretoo.
So I'll give you a tip and then I'll I'll give you a story.
(11:19):
Always include international compliance and localization
factors in your scope analysis. And when I worked at New Zealand
training enterprise, we had a Syrian system customized for our
both our BDMS and our customers mainly focused on the customers
in New Zealand, but the BDMS would use it and even accessing
(11:41):
that system, which was a global running on global SAS was a
mission from an infrastructure point of view in places like
China. So we had to you know, and
making it secure because this was sensitive information and
really this was sensitive information that could easily be
accessed is not secure. So we had to do some very, so
(12:03):
they had to be some very tight kind of VPN secure network which
which then had an impact on performance of the solution we
were providing. So you just got to be careful
about that. Number six is that relationship
management is everything. Trade is built on trust systems
(12:23):
that support relation, relationship visibility,
continuity and context. Gold.
So if someone is picking up a BDM moves on and then another
BDM comes in and they're workingin let's say Canada, it's they
need to know what the relationships were and you're
dealing with the, you know, the,all the Canadian officials and
(12:45):
you're exporting from the US to Canada.
Well, you need to understand thecontext, you need to understand
the relationships. The CRM side actually capturing
all interactions in one place isso important and your role is to
enable strategic human connections, not just
transactional relationships. OK, so I think more like a a
doctor then maybe going to your mechanic.
(13:09):
An example here is that you needto improve, or you are working
on improving a contact history tracking for offshore staff,
your BDMS. And then suddenly when they need
to prep for meeting with exporters, they maybe haven't
seen these people for ages, but they can go back into the system
(13:30):
and see like years of history, 10 years of history as a game
changer. And that matters.
It's like, oh, well, you know, Ispoke to Max and well, my
predecessor spoke to Max in 22, you know, and this was a
conversation he had and apparently it was really good.
And there was some some great conversations about how we can
help each other, blah, blah, blah. the BA tip is to
(13:51):
prioritize features that you're building that improve trust,
building transparency and continuity in stakeholder
journeys. So what I'm saying here is
repositories of information is, is very key.
And, and getting people to log those transactions is key, which
is a challenge. 7 is you'll be dealing with fuzzy problems.
(14:12):
Many initiatives don't have a tidy process map.
You're often dealing with emerging needs, pilots,
experimental programs, thinking off the cuff.
That's the people that survive in these roles overseas.
And ambiguity is the norm. OK, so you need to just you
can't just have a rigid process.Say it is an example.
(14:35):
We want to help expose exporters, tell their
sustainability story better, right?
What does that mean? You'll need to help figure that
out. You need to use maybe design
thinking and lean canvas techniques to shape the loosely
defined initiatives into BA ready problems that you can then
solve and have ideas. Localization, small, small
(15:02):
customizations with a small C, so you customize or you can on
the fly work dynamically #8 is that data drives narrative, not
just operations. So the agency reports to
government, right? And stakeholders are using data
(15:23):
to tell success stories. This means that dashboards
aren't operational. Dashboards are things, you know,
working well. What's the numbers?
Are we going up and down in revenue?
They are political and they are strategic.
Maybe you're working on a reporting enhancement for an
offshore team that's in another country and it's for their
(15:45):
activity feeds, right? That of what they're doing and
those conversations and the tagsand all the kind of soft
metadata that could feed into anannual report to Parliament or
to your government, the Congressor the Senate. the BA tip here
is treat data visualization and insight generation as part of
(16:06):
your analysis toolkit and is notpost project fluff.
It is may need to think about itfrom that angle 1st and you do
that sometimes with reporting projects anyway.
But this might be, you might have an extra layer on top of
that because the data that you're using isn't just constant
of data that you're collecting. It's also stories tags, you
(16:33):
know, really strange data pointsaround political influence and
things like that. So you really need to think
about that upfront and what do you stake owners want?
And that's what does the minister want.
And that, you know, for example,if you're feeding to a minister
and maybe one of your points is the fact that businesses aren't
getting to see our BDM's, aren'tgetting to see the higher ups in
(16:56):
a country, you know, for trade conversations, maybe the
minister of that particular area, they then go overseas and
meet the higher ups. And that's generally how it
works. And so your data needs to show
that, right? No amount of revenue figures
going to indicate that. Number 9, which is tricky, is
(17:18):
time zones and tools are part ofthe problem.
So collaboration isn't simple when your team spans Wellington,
New Zealand, Singapore, San Francisco and Berlin.
So tools, platforms and BA artifacts need to work async
across different tech stacks that work overseas or on a SAS
(17:40):
system that manages that for you.
An example might be your workflow design needs to assume
that staff may only touch a toolonce a week, not daily.
OK. And that's difficult for
capturing notes. So maybe you know your, all your
all these places we just talked about Singapore, San Francisco
and Berlin. You're trying to get one product
(18:02):
from New Zealand into those three places, right?
And you've got three different BEMS, but you want to feed that
information back and give your customer some insights.
And maybe you have to wait a week to get those notes through.
So you have to think about all the tools they use and are they
going to work in the centre you're working in?
If you're working in the middle of Africa, it's going to be
(18:24):
quite different all the rest of it, right?
And so it's not all coming in atnicely between 9:00 and 5:00 in
New Zealand time. It's, you know, the Americans, a
lot of Americans listen to this podcast.
Your later in the day is when you start work.
So the BA tip is to design for async clarity, record decisions
(18:45):
well, use templates and frameworks that travel well
across distance and different languages because it may be best
to capture your notes in the native tongue of that country.
Because context is key. And to be honest, the world is
is littered with examples where translation has caused problems.
(19:08):
And #10 is that exporters are hustling.
So respect their time. Your user quote, UN quote may be
a founder wearing 10 hats building a brand shipping
containers at midnight. If a digital solution that
you're working on waste their time, it'll die or get bad
(19:30):
feedback, right? An example is if you're building
a new tool for funding applications that they're
getting some funding from the government and it fails because
it requires too much manual entry.
The exporters will just bail after page two.
OK, and they won't they won't use you as a trade engine and
then maybe go direct or they'll use another.
(19:50):
They'll just, you know, start selling on Amazon, right?
And hope that that's a strategy,which is not a bad strategy,
depending on your company. the VA tip here is always test with
real exporters, not just internal proxies.
Simplify, remove friction ruthlessly.
It's got to be simple, OK, Don'task the same question twice.
(20:11):
Put their name in. You know all that kind of double
dudder entries is a no no. The international trade and
export sector is like an orchestra.
It's diplomatic, digital, deeplyhuman all at once.
As ABA, your role isn't just about optimizing workflows.
(20:34):
It's about helping businesses thrive on the world stage.
If you've got a global mindset and a sharp eye for strategy,
there's a lot of meaningful workto be done in this space.
If this resonated with you, please share it with another BA
or a mate at NZTU and subscribe for more episodes across other
(20:58):
sectors. And as always, keep asking great
questions.
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