Goodbye adidas, Tschüss Germany

I am closing a fantastic chapter of my life and looking back on my experience working at adidas and living in Germany.

What was my experience at adidas like?

From the moment the adidas team and I started talking, I saw a place where I could contribute my skills while gaining a working environment unlike anything I had experienced before. Living in another country and working with people from different nationalities and cultures is perhaps the most valuable part of this experience.

Adidas HQ, Herzogenaurach.

Allianz Arena, Munich.

1. Onboarding: how to manage when you are the only person who does not speak the language

When I arrived in Germany, I spoke no German at all. The country had never been part of my plans, so I had not had any previous contact with the language.

After completing the recruitment process, I was told this would not be a problem because most of the workflow, from KPIs and reports to the applications we used, was in English. Even so, the language difference was noticeable in everyday work.

I signed up for German lessons and completed an intensive three-month course to accelerate the process. At times I felt frustrated because connecting with my colleagues was difficult. Although they did everything possible to help me settle in, the more relaxed moments at work naturally happened in a language I still did not understand.

I would not describe it as a drawback. It helped me learn German quickly and taught me how to manage onboarding in multicultural teams.

2. Shared experiences: how to keep a team together

Given my situation, I have to acknowledge that adidas provides extensive resources for managing teams through inclusion and diversity.

Germany and adidas go hand in hand. I saw it firsthand when I went to the Allianz Arena with my colleagues to watch Bayern Munich. I had a great time, even though it was the typical Bayern match where they were already four goals ahead after half an hour. For those 90 minutes, I felt as though I was simply enjoying the match among friends.

I also have a photograph with Serge Gnabry, the Bayern Munich player. I was surprised by how people in Germany behave around public figures such as footballers: they are respectful and rarely ask for a photograph when they see someone in a personal setting.

Asking is not inherently disrespectful, as I did in this case. But I also remember meeting Sami Khedira and deciding not to ask because nobody else around us did.

Adidas HQ: what the adidas headquarters is like

I benefited from my time at adidas in many ways. My academic background is in human resources, but I have always been interested in marketing and digital transformation.

Getting to know Adidas HQ was another turning point in my career. Being surrounded by experts across different disciplines helped me understand how to structure teams made up of people who are highly qualified and, at the same time, very different from one another.

At first, I will not deny that I felt intimidated and experienced impostor syndrome: "What am I doing here? Do I deserve to be surrounded by people this intelligent?"

Putting those thoughts aside and allowing myself to enjoy the experience helped me grow enormously and recognize the value I could bring to a company.

Why am I leaving adidas and Germany?

If you have made it this far, I understand why you would ask that question. I had never felt so comfortable in an organization and, just as I was beginning to overcome the language barrier, why would I leave?

As difficult as it may be to believe, I was not happy.

Everything above was genuinely valuable and the progress I made that year was substantial, but the reality was that I did not feel well. In fact, I felt less happy even as I achieved bigger goals.

There was a great deal of growth and work between the recent graduate who started at Nike and the professional I had become. There are also moments when you have to make difficult decisions and take action again.

It took me a long time to recognize this because part of me did not want to admit it. Who would believe that someone could be unhappy while working for a major company like adidas? But that was the reality. These were some of the factors:

• Is this really what I want to dedicate myself to? My experience covered people management, marketing, workflows and no-code. For a while, that combination made it difficult to identify what I truly enjoyed and did well: finding my ikigai. Today I understand it more clearly, and it was not at adidas.
• Working as a freelancer alongside my role. This website is both a place where I share reflections and where I present my work and services. I enjoy developing no-code systems and features that help entrepreneurs and startups scale by reducing unnecessary processes.

What comes next?

I was not leaving adidas to sit back and watch life pass by. At the time, I could not yet share everything that was coming, but I knew I wanted to share my knowledge of no-code, Notion and Make, together with the systems I was developing for companies and individuals.

Closing this chapter was a difficult decision, but it also became the starting point for building a new project from scratch in Spain.

Thank you for reading this story. See you in the next one.