10 years at the same company?

📍 Prologue: A Three-Month Plan That Turned into a Decade

When I first moved from New York to Berlin in 2014, it had nothing to do with work. I just wanted to explore Europe while I was young and free. I was freelancing remotely — it was the perfect time to roam. I put my things in storage, sublet my Brooklyn apartment, and set out. I figured I’d stay three months, tops.

Fast-forward ten years: I’m still in Berlin, and I’ve worked for one company the entire time — Delivery Hero. That kind of tenure is rare in tech, where designers typically switch roles every 3–4 years. But DH (Delivery Hero) and I grew in tandem. We found each other at the right time.

🚀 Joining a Startup with Global Ambitions

Delivery Hero is a parent company of food delivery apps around the world. Some apps share codebases; others operate independently, with different tech stacks, strategies, and design approaches. When I joined, the company still had a scrappy startup mindset. Just three designers supported entire brands.

I joined in 2014 after meeting my future boss (and later, best friend), Erin McLaine, through a mutual friend in Berlin. She was looking for a product designer for a Delivery Hero's UK-based app called hungryhouse. The interview process was warm and informal. They offered me the role of “Junior Product Designer.”

I had three years of experience already and bristled at the “junior” title. But I was excited by the opportunity to work with Erin — and the prospect of a work visa that would let me stay in Europe.

🎓 Learning, Growing, and Leading

That junior title gave me room to be a student. I dove into A/B testing, user research, and UX experimentation. I visited customers in London, sat in their homes, and learned what it meant to design a product that served real people in real moments.

I helped hire my next manager and design mentor, Erin Fellows, who brought big-vision thinking and thoughtful leadership. My role expanded from web to apps, and I felt myself leveling up step by step.

Then in 2017, hungryhouse was sold to a competitor. I considered returning to the U.S. — after all, I felt done — I’d paid off my student loans and traveled my bucket-list countries. So I started interviewing with startups back in New York, including some in the blockchain space. But two things changed my mind...

💼 A Big Step Forward

First, Delivery Hero offered me a senior designer role on their largest platform team: Pandora. Pandora powered multiple brands across Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia — same basic UI, wildly different user needs. It was exciting. It was intimidating. I said yes.

Second, I met my future husband.

They say love comes when you least expect it. I knew this was different, and I couldn’t imagine leaving Berlin without seeing where it would go.

🔥 The Pressure to Level Up

The design team on Pandora was twice as big as hungryhouse. Our leader, Skali, had high expectations. I struggled at first — juggling squad and chapter responsibilities, figuring out where to focus, and trying to polish my visual UI skills for a more demanding product environment.

I felt the pressure. But I also felt supported. My leads gave me space to fail and learn, and eventually I found my rhythm. I contributed to both the squad and the broader chapter, developed onboarding materials, led design tool migrations, mentored new designers, and helped shape our design system.

🧭 From Designer to Manager

Eventually, I felt ready for something new. I wanted to scale my impact and grow into a leadership role. When Delivery Hero announced a full redesign of Pandora, I volunteered to help lead the component redesign, documentation and rollout. This turned into a major case study: Bento Design System

Through this project, I sharpened my skills in stakeholder engagement, project management, and cross-functional collaboration — and proved I was ready to lead a team. I became the manager of the design systems team.

👶 A Pause — and a New Chapter

In 2020, COVID hit. I had to cancel my wedding. I found out I was pregnant. As I prepared for maternity leave, we hired a brilliant replacement to lead the design system team in my absence — Enda O’Donoghue from HelloFresh. I stepped away for 12 months of maternity leave.

When my son was 1 year old in 2022, I returned to work and saw that the design system team had thrived. We discussed where I could bring the most value. The design system team seemed to be all set, so we looked across the rest of the organisation and eventually decided I would lead the web teams.

🌐 Resurrecting the Web Experience

Web had been overlooked in the big redesign — low order volume meant it was deprioritized. But it still played a critical role in our marketing funnel. I took over 2 orphaned designers and began with a blue-sky proposal: What if web got the same love the apps had received?

We refreshed the UX and visual language, aligned it with app best practices, improved accessibility, and refined micro-interactions. It became one of my proudest projects: Web Refresh

We followed it up with a major UX research initiative around online groceries. We tested AI-generated grocery lists, recipe integrations, price comparisons, and more. It was promising work.

But in late 2022, I found out that a large part of our team was being laid off. The project would not continue.

💔 Loss and Letting Go

Soon after, I was reassigned to lead a new group overseeing a group that included 3 squads: Corporate, Quick Commerce, and Courier. As I was re-orienting myself to this new scope I got the kind of phone call that splits your life in two. My younger brother, Daniel (28 years old) had suffered an massive asthma attack. To make a long tragic story short, he didn't make it.

There’s no manual for grief. And there’s certainly no playbook for navigating deep personal loss while holding professional responsibilities, especially after a round of layoffs that had already shaken the team. I wanted to be strong for them. I wanted to be present, empathetic, supportive. But I had nothing left in the tank.

I remember staring at emails that made no sense, sitting in meetings feeling like a ghost of myself. If you’ve ever lost someone close while trying to keep it together at work, you know this feeling — the strange dissonance of juggling calendar invites and deliverables while your inner world is in pieces.

I brought my vulnerability to my manager, Sara Kalinoski. And she met it with understanding and grace. I decided that the best thing for everyone — my team, the company, and myself — was for me to step away. I went home to the U.S. to be with my family and process what had happened.

That time was essential. Grief doesn’t follow a clean trajectory, and I’m still figuring it out. But I’m grateful to have worked at a place that didn’t make me choose between being a professional and being a human.

🌀 Reflection: Was It Time Well Spent?

A decade at one company is a rarity — especially in tech. But I look back on my 10 years at Delivery Hero and see a meaningful arc: personal growth, professional evolution, heartbreak, resilience, joy, and an ever-deepening skill set.

Delivery Hero and I both changed a lot. And I’m proud of the time I spent there.