Nobody likes being stuck in the middle.
When you’re an enterprise localization manager, being caught between a technology provider and a language services provider is a familiar scenario. When the two vendors don’t talk directly to each other, the localization manager becomes the go-between who manages the relationship between their vendors.
This isn’t a staffing issue or a disconnect about having the wrong person in the role. It’s a structural problem, and it’s been the default for as long as language technology and language services providers have worked together.
To tackle this issue, Argos Multilingual and Phrase decided to try something new. In 2025, we partnered with Phrase to co-fund a Solutions Architect role that is embedded within both companies. For the first time, Argos and Phrase had someone whose job it was to keep both companies coordinated and collaborative so the client didn’t have to, and also be an expert on both sides so that they could implement and recommend the best mix of tech and services for the client’s needs.
How the Joint Role Works
When we created the joint Solutions Architect position with Phrase, we hired one person with formal responsibility to both companies and built a legal agreement that let everyone involved work openly together. While the structure was intentionally left flexible, it’s defined enough to function and open enough to develop around the needs of each organization.
For Adelina Cristovao, Localization Manager at Personio, that foundation changed everything about how the collaboration felt day to day.
“We knew we were covered,” Adelina says. “We had the legal framework in place for all of us, so we could just speak freely as part of the same team.”
Without that agreement, both vendor teams would have been limited by NDAs and confidentiality agreements, and every conversation would have typically gone through the client first. That’s the problem the role was built to eliminate.
Collaborating with Personio
At Personio, the traditional vendor model relied on internal coordination to function. Adelina was managing a high-volume localization program for the company’s Customer Experience (CX) department, but because her technology provider and language partner each operated independently, she had to act as the liaison between them.
The risks of this kind of setup became clear when a member of Adelina’s team left the company. With fewer internal resources, the manual relay of technical requirements and project updates became a primary dependency. If Adelina wasn’t available to pass a message between the two vendors, the work stopped.
“I was sort of the messenger,” she remembers. “I was just carrying messages from people to people, not doing the work.”
The joint Solutions Architect role changed the structure by giving one person direct accountability to both Phrase and Argos. With the teams aligned, the two vendors began solving issues directly with each other.
The approach changed Adelina’s day-to-day focus and produced real results:
- Accelerated implementation: By removing the relay requirement, the team launched a new, fully integrated CX workflow in one month.
- Systemic oversight: Adelina replaced daily manual TMS monitoring with twice-weekly reviews, trusting the architect to manage the technical execution.
- Business alignment: With the administrative burden removed, Adelina could focus on how localization strategy supports Personio’s business goals and respond to internal priorities.
“Before, I had to go to Phrase every day to make sure everything was happening,” Adelina says. “Now if I go two or three times a week, that’s enough. It saves me days.”
Evolving Industries Need Evolving Roles
This joint Solutions Architect role didn’t emerge in a vacuum. The localization industry has long debated whether clients are better served by a single vendor that combines technology and services, or by specialized providers working in tandem.
Antoine Rey, Argos SVP of Customer Development, says that dramatic change in the industry is also driving the need for specialization.
“This is the third time we’ve had to reinvent ourselves in this industry,” Antoine says. “From translation memory to machine translation, and now to AI.”
Surviving these kinds of changes requires focus, while specialization drives reinvention. An all-in-one company must be an expert in both technology and language operations, which isn’t always possible. Instead, this model allows the technology and the language teams to specialize in what they do best. The joint Solutions Architect handles the overlap, ensuring that as the technology or the services evolve, the work doesn’t stop.
A Strong Case for the Ecosystem Model
Adelina didn’t want a single vendor. She wanted specialists, but she knew that keeping technology and services separate usually creates a coordination burden. The joint Solutions Architect role made choosing two vendors actually work.
“You have the best of both worlds,” Adelina says. “You have the independence of two different vendors, two different contracts, and two different negotiations. But then you have this added benefit of a joint solutions architect who works as an extension of your team. I bring the logic and the idea of the system and then we can all together figure out how this would work best.”
The model is already expanding. The joint Solutions Architect currently supports 8-10 shared clients across Argos and Phrase, and that number is growing. But the real validation came from the market itself: prospects are now specifically requesting this co-funded structure.
“I often joke that I spend more time with the Phrase team than with my own Argos teams,” Antoine says. “It’s increased more and more, and that has really helped in how we approach our joint clients.”
By formalizing the link between the partners, the joint Solutions Architect handles the back-and-forth that usually falls on the client. It’s a modern fix for a traditional problem: it lets the person running localization stop acting as the middleman and focus on the work they were hired to do.
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Liz Dunn Marsi
7 min. read
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