Who am I?

I’m a software engineering manager at Zalando in Berlin, Germany, following a near-decade-long adventure in Ireland. I believe that empathy is the building block for both great teams and great products.

Growing up bilingual with Hungarian and Serbian in the Balkans sparked a lifelong curiosity about how people communicate and connect. My love for learning more languages and cultures led me to live in Ireland and Germany. It has taught me a fundamental lesson that I apply to my life and work: there’s always more than one way to see the world.

This perspective is the foundation of my professional journey of building. My work began with writing code, but it quickly grew into a passion for creating products and, most importantly, the teams that bring them to life. Just as knowing multiple languages opens new ways of thinking, I’ve found that the best products are built by teams who value different viewpoints. There’s a special kind of magic in seeing a team click, where everyone supports each other to solve a customer’s problem; this is the magic that comes from truly understanding each other.

For me, this all comes together through empathy. Great work is about truly listening—to customers, to colleagues—and using that deep understanding to build products that improve people’s lives, making them more productive and happy. It’s about creating an environment where we can lean on each other’s strengths and learn from diverse perspectives. I believe the only real success is collaborative success, where we grow and achieve something together that would have been impossible alone. That collective journey is what I find most rewarding.

I’m always open to connecting with fellow builders and leaders to talk about creating teams built on psychological safety and open communication, where great products become a natural outcome. You can find me on LinkedIn or reach out at Emil Varga at Gmail.