My name is Michal Michal Annover, and I am a product manager at K Health, which is an AI, start up health care start up helping patients access care, US patients through health system.We developed an AI symptom checker that helps you identify what you have and help utilize the time with doctors much better. And we're working through different health systems, changing access to primary care. And what I'm passionate about I'm really passionate about AI. I'm passionate about health care, but I'm also really passionate about team building, about how teams communicate with each other, how we can grow through that, and efficiency in teams. Hi. I see more people introducing themselves in the chat. Thank you so much. Technical project manager. Nice to meet you. Cool. So let's get started. I'm hoping we have a few more people join, but if not, I hope this will be useful, small, and we can keep this engaging.

So please feel free to interact throughout this session. This is a space for us to work together and to talk and to bounce ideas as we all work in different industry, different states, different countries. So I'm hoping this will be useful for you. So what will we explore today? Today, we're gonna talk about identifying the cultural gaps that affect AI driven teams and how AI can enhance on one hand, global communication, but on other hand, sometimes it can, create gaps. And we'll talk about that and how to identify that. Next, we're gonna talk about how to apply the culture map framework into, working together as global teams. And I'm hoping to keep it as practical as we can. So we're gonna analyze real world case studies, and we're gonna walk away with some practical tools.

If you have any questions throughout this session, please drop them in the chat. If you can, I'm not sure if you can unmute and talk. If yes, feel free. If not, drop them in the chat. Cool. Let's start with a quick poll. If you can, please write in the chat if you work with global teams. And if you are working with global teams, what countries are your teammates from? Drop them in the chat. If you want, for extra points, write what's the biggest challenge you faced with your teams. So, again, if you work with global teams, what countries, and if you wanna share some challenge that you have. Okay. So we have a few. Olivia, nice to say that she has a few, teams in India. We have someone, working together with multiple teams as well. You you can India time zone.

So I, for example, I work with teams from Israel, from all over The US, Latin America, and Ukraine. Time zone, I can relate to this all. Definitely a challenge. Issue and understanding cultural differences. Great. I'm hoping you can leave this session, Stephanie, with some practical tips on how to adjust that. Let's see what else. We have Singapore culture clash with germ. I can imagine Singapore and German culture clashing. We're gonna give some examples of both countries very soon, so I'm hoping this will be useful for you. So about myself, I am as you can tell by my accent, I'm not American. I'm Israeli. I grew up in Israel, but I've worked back and forth with both fully American large corporate media companies and Israeli startups, HQ in New York, Israeli startup HQ in Tel Aviv, and different teams globally, across Europe, Latin America, Africa.

So I'm hoping this will be useful for you all. My goal is really to have you leave this forty minutes with practical takeaways on how to write, how to communicate, how to collaborate better, globally. So I wanna start with a short story, and I'm hoping that this will convince you that AI doesn't fail because of bad code. I mean, sometimes it does. Right? But mainly, it can fail because we ignore cultures. So as I told you, I'm working in a health tech startup when we developed an AI symptom, symptom checker ten years ago based on large amount of data from Israel. Now I come from Israel, a country where health system is nationalized, and every single doctor has access to all your different health records.

And, as a patient, for example, you don't have to advocate for yourself because the doctors have access to information. Another concept, for example, privacy, our national ID number equivalent to Social Securities in The US, is something that we share very easily over the phone, with a nurse, with anyone. And it's not because we don't care about privacy. It's because we have different privacy measurements than The US. When my company tried to penetrate The US market, bringing that symptom checker, bringing the app that we developed, and penetrating the market here, we found out that many times there are breaks in the funnel. Patients are hesitant answering even medical questions related to their visit. So they weren't comfortable sharing with the AI, algorithm symptom checker answer to questions about their symptoms because they're so used to do perceiving the privacy and health differently than we are in Israel.

So it was really interesting, and that really taught me that we can fail because we don't understand culture. And AI is we all live in a very interesting time. AI really reshape how we globally collaborate, and it is our job to leverage those tools that we have at our fingertips and to lead across culture and to be able to really leverage them, but know the risks that are involved and how, we can do it smartly. So that's what I'm hoping that you can leave, today's session with. So let's stop for a second and talk about how culture shapes AI. An AI model that trained in one country may perform poorly in another one. And why is that? I there's multiple reasons. Here are a few examples. First of all is that when you train your models, there's data bias. Now I know not all of you here are working with AI models, but we're all leaving a world where we interact daily with multiple AI models, and we have to think about that.

So the dataset that we feed our models often reflects on local norm, language, and context. For example, if I develop a symptom checker based on massive amount of data from a Western country, it might not accurately predict health issues in, for example, a South Asia, country. That's just one example. Or, there's gender biases. So for example, if we develop a algorithm in a country that, that is more traditional norms towards gender like Saudi Arabia or in a country like The US, we'll get completely different results. Second thing we need to know is that developers have influence. Even though we try to take away the human influence in a way, every decision that we make on what data we include, how do we structure our data, what features we prioritize will shape, is shaped by our local assumption and will shape the products that we develop.

So an example, privacy perceived differently in Europe and US. There's different privacy protocols in each, of these countries. There's different communication styles, which, some of you already talked about. Right? German and, India or UK and India. There's different communication styles, which we'll talk about in a second. Also views on on authority, gender, family, religion, all of those things. An example I can give is chat GPT. That's a model that was developed in The US, and the tone is relatively friendly, polite, professional. It can be perceived very differently by different users in different countries. And lastly, the user feedback loop, which is something I find fascinating as a product manager. The feedback we receive from our users is dependent on our users' culture. Right? So an AI tool that is used in one country and gets feedback from the users in that country will be developed and and will change differently from another country even if you're not leveraging AI tools to consume user feedback.

If you are a developer from one country or you are business development or engineer and you're working in a on a product that is actually in a different market than what you know, the feedback that you get from users might surprise you. So, really, I want you to take all of it and really understand that culture shapes the products that we develop. And what I want you to take from today is I look at culture as data. Culture is data. And if we ignore culture, we're gonna corrupt our models. But if we acknowledge them and we leverage different tools that I'm hoping to give you, I'm hoping that we can leverage and be smart leaders and you and understand the culture complexity in developing projects. I wanna move to the second part of this session, which is understanding the culture map framework. And I'm hoping this, you'll that you'll find useful. And next, we're gonna practice a bit with case studies. So the culture map is an amazing book.

I really recommend reading or listening to the audiobook by Erin Meyer, which is basically introducing us to eight different dimensions of culture impact, of culture that impact business. So think of yourself, each one of you are a leader, and your superpower is to understand the different cultures and how to interact with each other. I'm going to introduce the eight dimensions. I'll quickly talk about each one, and then we're gonna move into practical tip on how to handle each of these dimensions. So the first dimension is communicating. We have countries that are very low context versus countries or cultures that are very high context in communication. So for example, in The US, we're low, low context, Germany as well. High context mean that there is layered messages. So for example, countries like Japan or China are relying more on shared understanding.

When we evaluate and give feedback, whether if it's as a manager or as a colleague or to a client or as business partner. There is direct and indirect, feedback, acceptance in different cultures. So for example, a country like Israel gives very direct feedback, and and other countries give less. And, and sorry. When next, I wanna talk about the third one, which is persuading. As at any time in our job, whether you're an engineer, product manager, marketing, anything, you need to persuade others. You need to convince other to go with whatever is it that you're trying to persuade, right, to convey idea. And we have, cultures that are principle first versus application first, and understanding that will help you build your argument.

Principle first cultures, for example, like friends, are you are leading with theory versus application first, like The US, you're leading with practicality. So you would lead, for example, with case studies versus the theory. If we're speaking about leading, it's really important to understand the culture. So we have country or cultures that are more flat oriented, like, for example, Sweden. And we have culture that accept hierarchy better, like India. So rank and hierarchy is more accepted there. And when you lead, your rank, for example, matter more when you are working with that culture versus another. Making decisions is also something very important because you if you're, for example, is the one needing to make a decision on anything, in the culture you operate with, there might be different expectation on how you make a decision. So we have countries that or cultures that expect more consensual, like, for example, Japan, which a decision need to be accepted together versus places that accept more top down decision, like, for example, China, where it's expected for higher rank to get, pass the decision to lower ranks.

Trust is something very important. We all wanna develop trust, and some places develop trust based on performance. For example, The US, it's task based trust. There's other places like Brazil that are relationship, based trust, That you will gain trust of others by the relationship that you develop with them. And it's important to understand that about the places you operate in. One thing that I find super important is how we disagree because we're all gonna disagree at work. Right? At life, at work, How do we say that we don't agree? How do we argue? So some places are more confrontational, example, Israel, the place that I'm from. And I'm sorry if I keep on giving examples. I'm I think it's the last time I'm gonna give it as an example. But other places are more avoiding con confrontation, and it's important to, know that. Last, about scheduling, time means different things in different places.

End of day, end of week, urgent, for example. How many of you have used the word urgent at work and were surprised to see that it's perceived differently than how what you meant it? We have linear time, so cultures that are deadlines are more and functionality are more expected like Germany. And we have places that are more flexible like India. So, again, what I went through and I know it's a lot to consume, and I'm happy to share this with everyone, share the slides. I think this is recorded so you can watch it again. But we have eight dimensions of cultures that are impacting our business and our day to day working. So what can you do with these eight dimensions? Because it's not only important to acknowledge and understand them, it's also important to, learn how to address them.

For communicating, adapt your style depending on what direct, what is expected, if you're working in a direct culture or more subtle. When you give evaluations, so when you give feedback, it's really important to adjust how you give it. And what's honest and respected in one culture may actually be perceived as harsh in another. Something important to call out here. This is not only about culture. This is not only about, you know, making those generalizations saying, oh, if you're from this country, you're probably like that. People are different regardless of what culture they were raised in. Right? So it's important to also ask people how do you wanna get feedback and try to work with them.

In persuasion, you wanna match how you build argument into and make decision into how is accepted in that culture. On the topic of leading, you want to respect authority where needed, but also know to break the rules and go above authority in a way if it or invite open debate if it's, accepted in that culture. When you're making decision, know that, understand the decision making pace that is expected from you. So are you expected to make a decision and communicate it downstream, or are you expected to invite more of a collaboration, process for decision making? In in trust, it's very important. So if you operate in a culture that trust is based on relationship, make time for those relationship and understand how are those those relationship developed.

Are they developed at work time? Are they developed outside of work to earn that trust at work? It's really important. And I have a few stories about how I was able to actually, achieve business for my companies thanks to trust building in countries that are more, relationship based. When disagreeing, it's really important to disagree carefully or it will backfire, and we'll see an example in a case study in a second. And when scheduling, you wanna understand what is the way that the, culture you're working in is operating. And you wanna be very explicit about scheduling. Don't assume that, yes, end of day, end of week, or urgent mean the same thing for everyone. I wanna suggest that each one of you take this culture map, take this eight decision, eight culture dimension, and map your team, whether if it's your team is only, if you're working with global teams, definitely, I recommend.

But even if you're working with a team that is local, you you would you'll be surprised how people background, the cities they grew up in, their heritage, where their parents are from, is shaping how they feel with each dimension, and it can make you a better colleague, better leader, better manager to do so.

And remember that culture, there's no normal. Culture is relative. There's no right and wrong. Okay. I wanna go now and go quickly through a case study, and then, we're gonna look at a a few pitfalls and a few takeaways that you can do in order to, avoid those pitfalls. So in this case study, I'm I'm hoping you can engage with me in the chat. The scenario is that a product manager posts in a large Slack channel with product managers, engineers, and designers say mentioning to one of the designers, this is not what we agreed on. This design don't make sense. Can you change them? What happened next is that the designer did not respond. Hours later, the PM's manager heard that the designer was very hurt, and the manager reached out to the PM suggesting how to repair the situation.

So I wanna ask you in the chat if you can share. What's the cultural or communication norm that you think might be at play here? And if there's a different way that you can think that this message could be framed. I'll give you a second to read through it if you want and to respond. So, again, we have a PM that is posting in a large Slack channel saying that this is not what we agreed on. If anyone wants to share, I'll give you another second. And if not, I'll continue to, try to, analyze this case study. You're right. Olivia, the PM did not specify who the comment was for. So I think in this case and by the way, I am the PM in this story.

Very much in early in my, early days in journey, this was one of my learning, lessons in how to communicate with American teams. No no oops there. It was definitely a bad, bad experience, that I gave. I was not being a good teammate. But, also, I kind of edited this story to take off some context that you're all missing, and I wasn't as bad as this story perceived, me to be. But, I come from a culture that if we agreed on something in a meeting and even if it wasn't recapped and shared with everyone, the expectation is for everyone to follow through and take full ownership on their steps. And in this case, I called out that this is not what we agreed on. The new design don't make sense. Can you change them? And I mentioned the designer. The designer come from a different culture that is very not confrontational. That feedback is supposed to be shared privately and not, publicly.

And also, this in this case, the feedback that I received from my manager is that this not being a good leader in a way that if we agreed on something else, I should write, here's the evidence on what we agreed on, and share it, often so we can follow-up on action items for it, which is something different from the culture I come with.

Thank you. I see that we have more comments. It could be happened in my last team. So German team, Brazilian developer. Yes. Definitely could happen in a team like that. The the Slack message that I sent was very blunt. It was very hurtful to that, designer. I agree. And it was really creating poor feedback culture. I totally agree. And this was me very early in my career, and I learned a lot from it. And I learned that if I have feedback, for example, to a designer, I don't wanna call out that her design don't make sense publicly. I wanna give it privately. So even if I come from a more confrontational culture, there's different ways, and I need to think about how the other will perceive it. So I totally agree, with your message, here. Let's quickly go through another case study that might be a bit more simple.

So during a joint status call, an Australian engineer interrupts a Japanese project leader and says, nah. That's not right. We actually said the opposite yesterday. The Japanese lead went quiet, and the tone of the meeting completely shifts. Do you think this comment is disrespectful or it just reflects different style? I'm actually curious what you think. And how could this situation be handled more effectively? So, for the sake of time, I will continue. I'm hoping that you had a second to think through this situation. But I think it's it's an open question. For some people, this comment will be disrespectful for an engineer to interrupt a team lead. For others, interrupting in the middle of a sentence is not disrespectful. And I know it sounds crazy, but for example, my culture, it's not disrespectful. But the situation could be handled differently in a meeting.

For example, the lead could say, any comments you have, I will leave time. Or I expect you to interrupt me whenever you have a question. Please pop in anything in the chat, right, like I said. So it really reflects that we can start a meeting with setting the tone that we want. Okay. Let's do a quick recap of what we covered, and now I'm hoping to get to a a lot of practical tips that I'm hoping will be useful for you all. So we talked about how AI re reshaping global cultures. We talked about how people in return shape AI to shape global culture and why culture differences matter, and there's no one size fit all. So what each one of you now can do to drive more inclusive cross cultural collaboration. Let's talk about that.

I wanna give you some pitfalls, to watch and then some tactics you can use to handle. So first of all, the first pitfall that I think you should watch for is assuming shared context. Not everyone, interprets the same words the same way. Visual, workflows, raising a ticket, setting an alarm to wake up an engineer in the middle of the night, messaging people on Slack, calling a meeting. All those things are not things that people are, feel comfortable the same way. Culture bias is in data, is in design, and is in AI systems. So labeling, model logic, design choices that we make reflect the norms, sometimes unconsciously. And I wanna give you an example of something I learned yesterday. I told you I'm working as a product manager on a health tech startup.

And just yesterday, speaking to one of the doctors that work at our startup, she said, something about The US health system not being preventative care, being more reactive care. That completely blew my mind because in my country, we're very preventative care oriented. So every single thing that I think of when I design the app or the user experience, I was somewhere in the back of my mind assuming that patients and hospitals are open to being preventative and not necessarily reactive. But the way health systems are in The US and billing and insurance is completely different, and that shapes the app experience and that shapes the what would lead a patient to request help, that would lead the reason they book a visit. So even that just small example, I hope will convince you that the culture and the norms that we grew up in really reflects on how we make decisions in work, and we really have to be honest and always check ourselves. The la the third pitfall, is misalignment in communication style.

So what feels clear to one team might not be clear to another team and can lead to mistrust, and and a lot of rework. So what tactics can you do? How can we actually solve it? Map the culture difference early. And culture difference, again, can be with global team. Culture difference can also be if everyone are from the same small town because there's different cultures that reflect where you're coming from, where the house you grew up with, where you traveled, where you studied, all of those things. So use tools like the culture map to align on feedback, on authority, on time, on communicating norms. And this will help you prevent those misalignments and breakdowns. One thing that I really recommend is localizing design and AI training. So you really want to adapt the tone, the logic, and the behavior, not just the language. It's not a matter of only translation.

It's about involving local voices from work, whatever market you're trying to penetrate, with user experience, in research, in data, in testing workflows, and collect that feedback early. And lastly, build that cultural awareness into team practice team practices. Sorry. Either you use rituals like user manual, role play, assign culturally agents. So really try to encourage your team to have that culture of sunglasses on. It builds empathy and equity across teams. Some AI tools that you can use. Otter dot ai, for example, and Fireflies are good for transcribing and translating, global meetings. But, again, this is translation. It's not always culture. Chat GPT and Cloud are actually doing pretty good job in rewriting team updates into different cultural tones. So you can tell them, for example, most of my team is in this country, or I wanna keep it short because most of them are not English speakers, or don't use jargon or those kind of things, and they're doing really, fantastic job at that.

I actually want to leverage because we do have a group of people, and I'm always curious. What AI tools do you use? Is there any AI tools that you use in your workflow to to collaborate better with global teams? I know that, for example, I recently used Base 44, to build a workflow for my team, to quickly spin off some quick workflow that we need. Olivia, I see you don't use AI tools, but, I recommend even even trying to rewrite messages with ChatGPT or Gemini or Cloud. Just go play with it. Take the message. I think you said you're working with global teams at the beginning. So if you wanna say, I'm writing to this team or that team, deep, deepl.com is great for translation. Agree. Perplexity gets a lot of, agree. Cool. Great.

Thank you, everyone, for sharing the different tools that you're using. Okay. Great. One thing that I wanna leave you with, or the last, part of our our session, and thank you for interacting and being so active in this session, I wanna remind you that, really, misalignment in global team can lead to flawed products. So if you're working with teams and you're misaligned or you assume shared context or shared culture, your products might be flawed. And it can be in different ways. So for me, for example, it happens sometimes in the QA process when I assume that some context that I shared is enough for QA teams that were actually in a different country with different cultures to run with it. Communication is not always understanding, especially in AI. So the fact that you wrote something and rewrote it through, for example, chat GPT and shared it with the team does not mean that what you wrote and what you understand, the team will understand.

And culture, it shapes models training. It shapes our UX and collaboration. But the good news is that we have an amazing opportunity here. AI tools can really bridge cultural gaps, and it depends on how we lead them and how we use them too. And great leaders and each and every one of you are leaders in your own field, whether if it's in your team, whether if it's in your community, at home. You're setting an example, and you can help by bridge by bridging, by be putting people first and not and then systems. It will help you flex across different cultures, and you can use that, cultural mindset to listen, to adapt, and then to build with that context and to build stronger team. So my final ask for you is, please, if you can, I think it's only, if we make promise to each other, we it will make us actually do it?

Write in the chat one thing that you're planning to do in the next seven days to either speak, write, or lead, globally with the context of the shared team. And I know many of you said that you're, working with global team, so I'm hoping maybe there's one commitment that you can take. Great. Olivia, start using AI tools to write instruction better for Pune teams. That is great, and I actually use it in the past for teams with India, and it worked really well. Learn more about the team's culture. My commitment, I work with a product team that all are, born in The US. Actually, no. That's not true. Two are Israelis and the advisory of The US. So my commitment is that within the product team, I'm going to do the culture map framework for my team.

And I actually have it on the agenda for Monday for our product meeting. So I'm committing to you all, and I will follow through. Okay. Great. I do wanna, thank you all for joining this session, and I hope that this was useful. I see Sivan Sivan wrote that I did a culture map exercise and happy to share grades. So please connect with Sivan. I recommend. She's a great cultural leader that I follow on LinkedIn, so I recommend as well. So I hope that from this session, you really understood that culture isn't a barrier. It's something that is a powerful tool for you to use and leverage. And I'm hoping that whether if it's learning more about your teammates, maybe it's reading the culture math, maybe it's applying the framework, or using AI tools to rewrite.

We have so many powerful tools right here at the finger at our fingertips, and we can leverage them to build better products, build better relationship, communicate better. But we have to really be critical in our thinking and how we use them and leverage what we have with that global mindset. So I hope this was useful to you all. I'd love to connect. Feel free to reach out and talk. I'd love to talk anything culture or AI or global framework can help you think how you can apply the lessons learned in this session to your teams. Thank you everyone for joining today and for being so active. Thank you. Have a great day, everyone.