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'd still could 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-develop agency in Russia. Ship fast, iterate faster, minimal process, many-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" course.
So I was checking Google Translate under my desk while writing emails, keeping track of any patterns and new words. Sitting in meetings, following maybe 70% of what was being said, filling in the rest from tone and body language, and my imagination. And people were kind, like genuinely kind. Colleagues who made space at lunch, who'd slow down when they saw me struggling, they 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 two that shaped me most:
My job was simple to describe and complicated to do: move our BMC Helix ITSM 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 lots of legacy data, designed test scenarios, kept excels running, rerouted integrations, stayed on point for every issue and every stakeholder conversation. It was honestly exhausting. About 8 months of work from start to finish.
Then one day the "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.
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. After I asked my supervisor if I could take this project upon 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. And there was a lot to take in. Then I pulled the usage data, built dashboards, presented 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.
Results: 30% faster request submissions. Much less misrouting. Users who actually liked using it. Honestly, it sounds like success to me.
I braced for complaints after launch. First week — nothing. Second week — nothing. Then the letters of appreciation from management came... and then from the call center, and then from employees who finally started to enjoy the portal. I still smile when I think about it.
It meant the portal worked. Not just technically, but for the people.
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 doing on 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 in IT before starting SimpleMark. If something here resonated, I'd love to hear about it.