The Long Journey of Becoming a Digital Nomad

A bit of background

I've been working as a visual designer since 2005, more or less. For most of that time I looked for jobs at small, medium and large companies — a full-time job was my thing, with a steady income, perks and paid health care. Back then my self-esteem and confidence were very low. I come from a small Polish town near Kraków, and I always felt I didn't belong there. I wanted to make the world a better place, but I couldn't do it in my hometown, with its dying-city mindset.

So I left for Warsaw to look for opportunities. With a year or so of experience designing websites, I landed a job at a friend's company — not a time I remember fondly. Joining them was the safe call: it let me skip a painful round of interviews with a weak portfolio. So convenient, right?

I call that period my Dark Ages: three years of working mostly on Orsay's marketing materials, printed and distributed to their stores across Europe. I mastered InDesign and print proofing, and made some spectacular mistakes that still make me blush — luckily, none of them ended in disaster.

Next up was PayU, a payment service provider that in 2014 was still part of Naspers, alongside Allegro (Poland's largest e-commerce and auction platform — we used to throw parties together). It was my first serious tech company: working in Agile (and my love-hate relationship with Scrum) with an incredible team of developers. I learned a lot about gathering requirements, scoping features, handing off and shipping with quality assurance, and I was amazed how this process — still new to me — let us deliver software fast and in small increments. That one year was when I realised how much I enjoy building digital products.

Fortunately or not, a breakup and a redundancy at PayU hit me hard — and opened up new possibilities. I invested a generous severance package in moving to London. With poor English, even less confidence, a few thousand in my pocket, a suitcase and a Mac mini, I went to England to start a new life.

London

Building startups and playing ping-pong at ucreate

“We can't hire you because of your English,” said one company after an interview — one of the five I had back then. It was tough: 15 years of English lessons at school seemed to count for nothing. Luckily, ucreate had a very kind and open-minded Polish Scrum master, Paweł.

I joined as the fourth person at HQ — a very narrow room in a co-working space at Aldgate East. Two Englishmen with harsh Cockney accents and two Polish guys in one room, validating our customers' startup ideas. The product work I'd done at PayU in a year was squeezed into two months, multiplied by the two or three customers we had at a time. The learning curve was steep: I learned to work under pressure, and how to handle it.

I loved that fast pace — quick, efficient, to the point. It lasted two years, until I realised there was nothing new left to learn and it was time to slow down a bit. With an updated portfolio and my LinkedIn open to recruiters, I started getting lots of calls and emails with generous offers.

I felt like the best part was about to happen.

Case study from this time: Swift — drink pre-ordering app

Fun with Kite(s)

Kite was a fun company with fun people. We built a print-on-demand platform that connected creators with printing facilities and let them sell their merch on e-commerce platforms like Shopify. The product was buggy and a bit dated visually, which is why I joined the design team — Dan, Dani and Greg. We focused on improving the product-creation experience (for example, an editor for placing images on pillowcases: transform the image, apply filters, add stickers and other media).

We offered a complete white-label solution for web and mobile, used by Canon Print Shop, Polaroid, LifeCake and others. The whole team of 35, based in a very cool co-working space at Old Street Roundabout, had lots of fun building the product, went out often and kept work stress-free.

I was really sad to leave, but a new opportunity was waiting for me in Amsterdam.

Case study: Print on demand platform and editor

Amsterdam

I'd visited the Netherlands many times before, mostly because my family lives there — it was convenient to crash at their place between sightseeing and the occasional visit to a coffee shop. Amsterdam has a particular vibe that I enjoy, and for its size it welcomes expats with an endless choice of bars, restaurants and places to party.

Moving there was an obvious choice, and I did it as soon as I'd signed the offer from Adyen.

Adyen

Working at Adyen was a huge change in my career. I worked with very talented product designers of different backgrounds, experience, nationalities and cultures — a team of 16 people who were great fun to work with. Getting in took 7 interviews with 13 people over two and a half months.

Once I started, I understood why the interviews mattered so much: they were about fit. My way of working is pragmatic — I look at a problem from many perspectives, especially my team's, and we always liked comparing our views to find possible solutions.

That made for a well-balanced environment between focusing on deliverables and experimenting with new ideas — and having a blast doing it. One of the challenges at Adyen, in the middle of hyper-growth, was managing stakeholders and keeping communication transparent and up to date.

I helped build a set of internal tools for treasury management (payouts, balances and more), then moved to another team to work on explainability for machine learning. Even with a fun team, exciting projects and learning A LOT, something was missing.

Case studies from Adyen: Merchant Financial Dashboards, Payment Fraud Detection Dashboard and Better Data Tables for ADL

Amsterdam UX

One of my teammates, Tatiana Sidorenkova, runs the Amsterdam UX meetup group, and she invited me to become one of the organisers. I love organising events and making sure people have a great time. My job was to come up with topics, invite speakers, find venues and make sure everyone had a drink and a slice of pizza in hand. It was going great until the first lockdown in the Netherlands.

Lockdown

Working remotely from an expensive, tiny apartment in Amsterdam, I realised it was time to move on. I felt confident enough to swap corporate life for something more demanding: being fully on my own and joining interesting projects around sustainability and the environment — basically, design for good.

That brings me to the next chapter: burnout, depression and an urgent need to change my life so I could be happy again.

Moving forward

My plan was to build a career in the Netherlands: settle down, buy an apartment, equip the kitchen properly (I love to cook) and pay off the mortgage over 20 years. However safe, secure and reasonable that sounds, it didn't feel right. Short, cold winter days, flat landscapes, closed venues and an expensive cage made me think about leaving it all behind and trying something else.

Around the end of February 2021 I read an article about the Digital Nomads Madeira community. It sparked the idea of a radical change: stepping out of my comfort zone (a cosy flat, a well-paid job, next-day deliveries of useless stuff from Bol). Joining their Slack group was eye-opening, and I couldn't have been more excited about constant travel and remote work.

After 15 years of building a career, with short breaks between jobs and some savings from not buying an apartment, I decided to pack my things into a self-storage unit and take an indefinite holiday. The whole process was exhausting and stressful. What if something goes wrong? PCR tests? Cancelled flights? Too many ifs.

“Pack & go” was probably the best decision I've ever made. I've now been on the beautiful island of Madeira for 20 days, and I can feel happiness, positivity and well-being coming back to where they belong. Daily yoga and meditation help me focus on how I'd like my day to look. Like-minded people with lots of questions and lots of answers, unconditional support I've never experienced before, sharing ideas, building a network of people I may work with in the future — and best of all, the serendipity of following your heart.