At a glance
- Role: IT Service Management Consultant, Migdal Group, Aug 2022 – May 2025
- Platform: internal service platform used by 5,000+ employees
- Employee portal: rebuilt from user interviews and usage data; requests submitted 30% faster, less misrouting
- Service catalog: 40+ new services in a year, platform usage up 60%
- Cloud migration: about 8 months, live on schedule
I showed up to my job interview at Migdal Insurance a week early.
Not a day early. A whole week! I'd misread the date, got dressed, took the bus, then another one, walked into the huge glass corporate building and announced myself at reception, completely calm, completely confident, until they told me.
I stood there, new to Israel, still building sentences in Hebrew one word at a time, and I had to decide what to do with the embarrassment. I apologized and explained I was new. To the company, to the country, to everything basically. And I asked, "Is there any chance you could still see me?"
And they did. Shocking, right?
I still don't know exactly why. Maybe they saw something, or they were just kind. But they gave me a second chance before I'd even had a first one. I walked out shaking a little (not a little), absolutely grateful, and I didn't know what to do with it.
That was 2022. What followed was three years that changed me more than any list of projects ever could.
I came from a fast-moving design-and-development agency in Russia. Ship fast, iterate faster, minimal process, many projects per person. Migdal was the opposite. A large insurance company, thousands of employees, layered approvals, formal communication, and... suits? I didn't know how big companies worked. I didn't really know Israeli corporate culture. And my Hebrew was functional at best, after the first level of ulpan.
So I was checking Google Translate under my desk while writing emails, keeping track of patterns and new words. Sitting in meetings, following maybe 70% of what was being said, filling in the rest from tone, body language and my imagination. And people were kind, genuinely kind. Colleagues who made space at lunch, who slowed down when they saw me struggling, who explained things and laughed with me at my silly mistakes.
I learned Hebrew the way you learn to swim. You just... get in the water. Coffee breaks, lunch conversations, the slow accumulation of words and idioms, until one day I was writing technical documentation in Hebrew without thinking twice.
That still surprises me a little, honestly.
Three years. 5,000+ employees. A lot of projects. Here are the three that shaped me most.
The old portal was slow, messy, and built in the early 2000s. Almost nobody liked using it. So I wanted to rebuild it from scratch. When I asked my supervisor if I could take the project on myself, he simply said, "Why not?" That's the entire story of how I got myself into this.
I started by interviewing employees and department leads, not to gather formal requirements, but to understand what actually frustrated people. What made them give up and call IT instead. What they wished existed. There was a lot to take in. Then I pulled the usage data, built dashboards, presented the findings to management, designed the flows and the UI, and built the whole thing myself.
And then I stood in front of rooms of colleagues. In Hebrew. To audiences who had every right to be skeptical. And walked them through the system I'd built.
I was nervous every single time. Every single time it went fine. Five presentations in two weeks.
The results: requests submitted 30% faster, much less misrouting, and users who actually liked using it.
I braced for complaints after launch. First week, nothing. Second week, nothing. Then the letters of appreciation came, first from management, then from the call center, then from employees who finally started to enjoy the portal. I still smile when I think about it (and rewatch the shaky-hands videos I made of those emails when I feel discouraged).
It meant the portal worked. Not just technically, but for the people.
The portal was the front door. The service catalog was everything behind it: the services employees could actually request.
I treated it as a product rather than a list. I defined how a new service goes from spec to production, so every new request followed the same path instead of starting from zero. I built reusable service blueprints, which made developing new services up to 90% more efficient.
In a single year we launched 40+ new services, and platform usage grew by 60%. More services people needed meant more people using the platform instead of working around it.
My job here was simple to describe and complicated to do: move our BMC Helix platform to the cloud without breaking anything for the 5,000+ people who depended on it daily. Especially the call center. I built the roadmap, cleaned a lot of legacy data, designed test scenarios, kept the spreadsheets running, rerouted integrations, and stayed on point for every issue and every stakeholder conversation. It was honestly exhausting. About 8 months of work from start to finish.
Then go-live week hit.
There were a couple of issues... Ticket statuses weren't translating into Hebrew. Approval workflows broke. Email links pointed to the wrong domain. We fixed them one by one, in real time, while everyone watched.
I wasn't sure we'd make it. But the team was fast, BMC was responsive, and somehow we went live on time. And stayed live.
What I took from it: it doesn't matter how carefully you plan. What matters is how you respond when things go sideways.
I went in thinking this was IT work. It turned out to be people work, with IT as the medium.
Management gave me real responsibility early, after I showed them determination. Whole projects, delivered alone. And that trust did something: it made me rise to meet it. I stopped waiting to feel ready and started trusting my own judgment. Carefully at first, then more freely.
I also learned that systems only work when people trust them and understand them. Which means the technical part is almost never the hardest part. The communication is, the training, the willingness to sit with someone who's frustrated and actually listen.
By the time I left, I could do things I couldn't have imagined that morning I showed up a week early, shaking in the glass lobby.
Migdal was my first real corporate experience, my first job in Israel, and in a lot of ways my first real proof to myself that I could build something that genuinely helped people.
Sometimes I think about whoever at reception decided that a confused girl who came on the wrong day deserved a chance anyway. I don't know who made that call. But I'm grateful.
I carry all of it forward.
This piece is part of a series reflecting on my years before starting SimpleMark. If something here resonated, I'd love to hear about it.