Key Facts
- Time at Holafly: 3 Years
- Current role: Customer Experience Content Lead
- Started as: Customer Support Specialist
Before becoming Holafly’s CX Content Lead, Sharon Ortiz was a preschool teacher in her homeland, Colombia, and she loved it. Working with kids taught her as much as she taught them. But after the pandemic hit her pay in ways she couldn’t sustain, she made the call to chase another dream: becoming an au pair in the US.
To save up for it, she took a job at a call center handling both calls and chats, a detour that became her first real taste of remote work. It was challenging at first, but with time, she grew more confident and comfortable in the role. A year later she had saved enough, and she spent the following year in Columbus, Ohio, as an au pair caring for three kids she loved.
What she didn’t like as much was the food. “My host mom only made frozen meals” she says, “and I was used to cooking things fresh”. It may have seemed like a small detail, but for her, food was closely tied to the feeling of home. This made her realize how much she wanted her next chapter to be built on her own terms, with a job and a life that felt more like her own. That’s when her boyfriend told her about an opening at Holafly, an opportunity that seemed to offer exactly that kind of independence.
The boat question and the answer that shaped her journey
Landing the job wasn’t easy, she remembers. There were three rounds of interviews, which felt unusual to her, because most of her past jobs had involved only one conversation and a yes or no answer. In the final round, the Managers asked her one last question: you’re on a sinking boat with different people, who do you save?
“No”, she told them, “we all save ourselves, or we all go down together”. It wasn’t a strategic answer; it was just what she believed, and it seemed to be the right answer.
What stuck with her most on day one wasn’t the training itself, it was the story behind the company: how the founders had hit a real setback in 2020 and kept going anyway. “What holds people back from starting something is fear”, she says, and that idea followed her into everything that came next.
The early weeks were genuinely challenging: she’d never even heard the word eSIM before walking in. However, her chat experience from the call center helped her pick up the pace fast, so within a month she felt like a pro. By that time she was already juggling three chats at a time and keeping a close eye on her improving metrics.
Facing every challenge like it’s a boss fight
Somewhere during the first months, something clicked that would end up defining her whole path at Holafly: the first time a customer reached out with an eSIM issue on an Android device, she realized there were no tools developed for those phone models; everything was built around iPhones.
“How is it possible we don’t have the resources for this”, she remembers thinking, “when we have to go search it on Google ourselves, taking time we don’t have with our metrics?”
Sharon took the initiative to build the resources herself: she had a Samsung of her own and some background in graphic design, so she started editing screenshots and building cleaner, more visual macros to help out customers.
She’s open about the mindset that made this feel less like extra work and more like fun: she loves video games, and she started treating each month’s metrics like a boss fight to beat. This gaming mindset kept her ranked first on her team for three consecutive months.
Helping others improve opened the door to leadership
The moment that started the next chapter was a small task that came from her team leader at the time: “You’re really good at this, please teach these two coworkers how you do it so they can improve too”. Sharon shared with them the Samsung macros she’d built for herself, and it turned out to be an actual problem-solver; the two coworkers she trained only had iPhones and had no idea how a Samsung even looked. Today, one of those colleagues still works alongside her, she says proudly.
It wasn’t the first time she’d taught someone something from scratch, just the first time it happened over a meeting instead of a classroom.
That feedback loop made its way to her manager, the one who’d end up becoming something close to a mentor for her. Seeing that Sharon wanted to grow, and was already quietly doing the work, she brought her onto a new initiative: turning the internal macros into something public-facing, an actual FAQ library customers could use to self-serve before ever reaching out to support.
Building lessons anyone could follow
Scaling the FAQ project meant doing something Sharon hadn’t fully prepared for: rebuilding it across languages she couldn’t speak herself, with barely any of the same resources. No devices, no proper design software, and a process that was almost entirely manual: building screenshots from scratch, hunting for references online, and asking native speakers to check her work line by line.
It was the same process, repeated language after language, that had worked when she trained her two coworkers: take something complicated, break it into a visual guide anyone could follow. Only now, instead of walking two people through it in real time, she had to build it from scratch twelve more times in languages she didn’t speak.
“It took a long time”, she says, “but we pulled it off”. She believes her team was among the first in the industry to offer content in languages like Arabic, screenshots included. What started as two languages grew to thirteen, and the team is now working toward nineteen.
From a side quest to its own squad
By the time the FAQ project had real impact, Sharon’s manager had too much else on her plate to run it day to day, so the task of leading the small group fell to Sharon almost by default. What had started as three people working under the FAQ Project eventually became Customer Experience Content, a team of four now, with Sharon at the front of it.
“I feel like we’re the ones who actually built that team”, she says.
Before, whenever the product team launched something new, CX Content tended to be the last to find out, which meant the team got caught off guard without the FAQs or macros needed; whether customers were searching on Google or asking agents directly. Fixing that meant securing a seat at the table before release day, ensuring the resources agents rely on are ready the moment a feature goes live.
That’s the kind of project Sharon leads now, and it’s taken her somewhere she never expected: working directly with product managers, shaping questions and answers before they ever reach a customer. “I’d never spoken with a product manager before”, she says, “now I do it all the time”.
When the target moves, you move with it
Holafly’s own goals have evolved since Sharon’s team first started, and adapting to that has been one of the harder parts of the job. The original brief was to become the company’s eSIM knowledge library. In 2026, the task changed: focus more on the traveler’s actual journey, before, during, and after the trip, with the real goal being fewer support contacts rather than more web traffic.
“What made sense in 2023 or 2024 is different from what’s needed now”, she says.
That adaptability paid off in other ways too: at one point, Sharon flagged that a planned change to invoicing and top-ups needed her team’s input before it launched. “We have a whole protocol built around this”, she told them. “If it changes, agents need to know what to say”. That catch showed how involving her team early keeps agents ready even as the company’s goals and features keep evolving.
How she recharges for the next level
None of this runs on adrenaline alone; all that drive at work has to come from somewhere else. For Sharon, that meant fixing the fact that she spent a lot of time at home while settling into her new role, until her boyfriend more or less dragged her to the gym, as she puts it. Now her mornings start at 4 a.m. with breakfast, gym by 5 a.m., and online with her team by 7:40 a.m. to map out the day before the meetings start.
Off the clock, the same gamer who turned her metrics into a monthly boss fight comes right back out: she plays video games, watches anime series, and hunts down her figure collection online; like an articulated InuYasha piece she assumed she’d only ever find in Japan. She even spent six months studying Japanese before her new role, something she still plans to pick back up.
During weekends work stays out entirely, no exceptions. “I stay away from touching anything work-related”, she says, “and pick it back up on Monday”. If an idea for the week ahead pops into her head anyway, she writes it down and lets it wait.
The lesson she’d give herself
Asked what she’d tell herself on day one, Sharon doesn’t hesitate long. Start the macros project sooner and take screenshots of the Pixel phone she had when she was an au pair, she says half-joking. However, the real advice underneath it is more personal: don’t be shy about helping people.
It was training those first two coworkers, low-stakes as it seemed at the time, that showed her other people were struggling with the exact same gaps she’d already solved for herself.
“You always have that fear that things won’t work out”, she says, “and that fear is what stops you from taking the next step”. The people around her helped her get past it, and these days, she tries to be that person for someone else.
Every level up starts with someone willing to take the first step; if you are one of those people, check out our open roles on the Careers Page.
