On switchting careers

The last time I left an office for good, I stood outside the building for a moment longer than I needed to.

Eight years. I'd done my dual study program there, learned almost everything I know about building products, and eventually led the innovation lab. I built things that still have a legacy in that company today. I had colleagues who had become friends – people I'd spent more waking hours with than my own family. And I was walking away from all of it to become a freelancer in the middle of a global pandemic, in a field I was only beginning to understand.

Someone had said something to me that I couldn't stop thinking about. It was a version of this: at the end of your life, sitting on your veranda in a rocking chair, you don't want to be the person asking what would have happened if I had just... That thought wouldn't leave me alone. So I left.

I'm now about to do this for the third time.

In November, I'm making another major shift (leaving the design world I've been in for the past few years and going full into AI). I'll be working on AI transformation at an energy company here in Germany, which also happens to be in my hometown. After years of remote work and long commutes to other cities, I'm coming back to where I grew up.

It's funny to trace the arc of it. I started in business informatics because I wanted to code. Then I discovered I loved designing software more than building it, and I moved into product and UX. Then I went freelance. Then I went back into employment, going deep into one product at a large media company, and found out what focus feels like. Then I moved into an agency, combining product and design. And now, with AI changing basically every workspace around me, I'm going back to informatics. Back to where it all started, but somewhere completely different at the same time.

I've been thinking a lot about what actually makes these transitions feel so big. And honestly, it's not the practical stuff.

The learning curves are steep and the uncertainty is real, sure. But what actually hits hardest, especially that first time, is how much of the weight is about people. Leaving a job is leaving a community, and you don't fully realize that until you've done it. The colleagues who get your references without explanation. The shared language you built over years of working together. What I can tell you from the other side, though, is that the best of those relationships don't go anywhere. I still have people from every single phase of my career in my life, and those cross-world friendships, between designers and engineers and product folks and now AI people, have become some of the richest ones I have. The community doesn't shrink when you switch. It grows into something more interesting.

I've also noticed, now that I can look across a few of these transitions: I bring the old job into every new one.

My years in product and innovation made me a completely different kind of designer. I was always thinking about the problem, about the system, in ways that pure designers sometimes weren't. And I came into design without a traditional background (I was self-taught, I genuinely sucked at art in school, and when I went freelance I was figuring it out as I went). A few years later, I was walking through my design process on the official Figma YouTube channel. I have a sign in my home office that says BELIEVE (the one from Ted Lasso) and I think that arc is exactly what it means. You don't need permission or a perfect starting point. You just need to believe it's possible long enough to find out. And now my years in design are going to make me a different kind of AI practitioner (someone who thinks about interfaces, about user experience, about how the technology actually lands with the person using it). You don't shed the previous chapter when you turn the page. You carry it, and it shapes how you see everything in the next one.

Career switches are really frightening. Every single time. But I've started to think of that fear differently. It's not a warning sign. It's a signal that you're pointing toward something that actually matters to you.

I've also found that none of my pivots were fully chosen in the traditional sense. Each one started with an opportunity I recognized and decided to take. I wasn't executing a master plan. I was paying attention and saying yes when something appeared that felt right. I think there's something worth sitting with there (the idea that a career isn't always something you design top-down, but something that emerges if you stay curious and keep your eyes open).

What I do know is that every single time I've made this leap, it has paid off in ways I couldn't have predicted from where I was standing. The version of me going into AI right now carries something from every chapter that came before. The informatics foundation. The design eye. The product instinct. The ability to sit in a room with engineers and also with end users and understand both. That's only possible because I kept saying yes to the uncomfortable thing.

So if you're standing somewhere right now wondering whether to make your own jump, I'd ask you this: sit in that rocking chair for a minute. Ask yourself the question. If the answer makes you a little nervous, that's probably your answer. The other side of the leap was always worth it for me. I haven't found an exception yet.