What I learned building customer success in Japan from scratch

In late 2021 I joined Vercel as its first Japanese-speaking customer success hire. There was no Japanese playbook and no local team. The customers were Japanese enterprises that had bought an American developer platform and, reasonably, expected it to behave like a vendor that understood how their company works.

Five years later I lead the customer success team for Asia Pacific and Japan and run go-to-market for Japan. Most of what made the difference had little to do with the product. Here is what I'd tell someone starting the same job at a different company.

Japanese is part of the product

Engineers in Japan read English documentation all day, so it's tempting to think English support is enough. It isn't, and the reason is internal politics, not comprehension.

The engineer who picked your product has to defend it to people who never touched it: their manager, the security team, procurement, sometimes the board of a subsidiary. Those people work in Japanese. If every answer your champion needs arrives in English, you are asking them to translate your sales material in their spare time so they can argue for you. Most won't, and the deal quietly stalls.

So I stopped translating the global deck and started rebuilding it. Fewer slides, more written detail, and every number explained in a sentence. Decks in Japan get forwarded after the meeting and read by people who weren't in the room. A slide that only works with a speaker next to it doesn't survive that.

Renewals start the day the contract is signed

Large Japanese companies approve spending through ringi (稟議), a written proposal that collects approvals through several layers before anyone signs. Budgets are usually set once a year, well before a fiscal year that commonly starts in April.

If you show up with an expansion proposal a month before renewal, you have missed the window by about six months. The budget is already locked and nobody wants to reopen it.

What worked for me was mapping the success plan to the customer's calendar instead of ours. When does budgeting start? Who writes the ringi? What evidence does that person need, and in what format? Once I knew that, the rest of the year had a shape: onboarding, a first review with numbers, then the material the champion needs right before their budget cycle.

Write business reviews for the person who isn't in the room

An executive business review in Japan is rarely where the decision happens. It is where your champion collects the evidence they will use later.

That changes what a good review looks like. I aim for a document that stands on its own: what the team shipped, what changed for them in terms they already measure (release frequency, incidents, time spent on infrastructure), what it cost compared with the alternatives, and what we propose next. If the champion can forward it to their boss without adding anything, it did its job.

The partner is part of the account

Many Japanese companies build through system integrators and consultancies. The integrator's engineers often know the codebase better than the customer does, and they have a relationship with the customer that is older than yours.

Treating partners as competitors for the account is a mistake. I treat them as part of the account team: enable their engineers, share what we see, and let them lead where they are stronger. Working with partners like Classmethod and AWS Japan did more for adoption than anything I could have done alone.

Be the bridge in both directions

Half the job is explaining the vendor to the customer. The other half is explaining the customer to the vendor.

Requests from Japanese enterprises can sound strange to a team in San Francisco: a detailed incident report in Japanese within a day, a security checklist with hundreds of questions, a demand for a named contact who answers in Japanese during Japanese business hours. None of it is strange once you know the context, and it's my job to write that context down in English so product and support teams can act on it without a meeting.

Osaka is 16 or 17 hours ahead of San Francisco. You can't fix that with more calls. You fix it by writing things down well enough that nobody needs to call.

Community does the selling you can't

Japanese engineers trust other Japanese engineers more than they trust a vendor. Meetups, study sessions, hackathons and conference talks built more credibility than any campaign. They also taught me what people actually struggle with, which I brought back into how we onboard customers.

If you're starting the same job

Learn the customer's fiscal calendar before you learn their architecture. Write more than you present. Make friends with the integrators. Show up at community events and listen more than you pitch. And if you can work in Japanese, do: it isn't a nice-to-have, it's half of what the customer is buying.