Founder of Stork & Spark | Career Development Coach | Executive Coach | Leadership Developer | Negotiation Advocate | Change Manager | Team Builder | Culture Change Consultant | Advisor | Facilitator
Most companies treat pregnancy as a logistics problem. Someone is leaving for a few months. Coverage needs to be arranged. A return date gets calendared. And somewhere in that administrative shuffle, a high-performing employee quietly recalibrates their ambitions downward, without anyone in the organization noticing until it is too late. Kelly Ling noticed. And she built a company around the conviction that the moment everyone else calls a pause is actually one of the most clarifying, career-defining windows a professional will ever have.
Kelly Ling is the founder of Stork & Spark and an ICF-certified executive coach based in Lafayette, California, who has worked with more than 1,000 expectant and new parents to help them use the transition to parenthood as a foundation for more deliberate, values-aligned careers. She is also a former people operations leader who spent nearly five years at DoorDash scaling systems and teams through some of the most demanding growth conditions in recent tech history. The combination is not accidental. It is the point.
From Audit Rooms to Hypergrowth War Rooms
Kelly Ling’s professional formation began not in HR or coaching but in accounting. She joined Deloitte and Touche as an audit associate after completing her undergraduate degree at UC Berkeley. The work was rigorous and precise. It trained her to look for what the numbers were not saying as much as what they were. She spent three years testing balance sheets, reviewing internal controls, and building the kind of analytical foundation not generally required for HR or coaching.
From there, she moved into finance at Ghirardelli Chocolate Company, where she became the lead analyst to the marketing team and a core member of the new product development team. It was cross-functional work at its most demanding, requiring her to translate financial realities into language that product, sales, and operations teams could actually act on. She earned her MBA from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, where she focused on marketing, entrepreneurship, technology, and healthcare. That combination of disciplines would prove to be less of an academic exercise and more of a preview of the career she was building.
She entered healthcare technology through McKesson’s RelayHealth division, rotating through strategy, marketing, and product management before landing at Change Healthcare, where she eventually served as Director of Product and then moved into the Office of the CEO as Director of Enterprise Initiatives. In that role, she was responsible for a business transformation program that blended Lean Startup principles, agile methods, and change management at enterprise scale. It was the kind of work that required equal parts strategic clarity, organizational patience, and scaled empathy.
Then came DoorDash.
Ling joined in early 2020 as Global Head of Learning and Development for Customer Experience, inheriting a small, generalist team responsible for training a learner base that was about to explode. DoorDash had fewer than 4000 employees when she joined, which grew to over 20,000 within her tenure. The existing model, where every trainer created content, delivered training, and ran onboarding simultaneously, was not going to survive what was coming.
She restructured the team entirely. Generalists gave way to specialists: instructional designers, knowledge content managers, dedicated trainers, and program managers aligned to specific customer segments. She grew the in-house team from roughly 10 to more than 60, extending the bench to over 100 by building a train-the-trainer program with vendor partners. The governing metrics were unambiguous: speed to proficiency, customer satisfaction scores, quality assurance, and learner satisfaction. New hire classes were measured against tenured agents. The gap between them was the number that mattered.
She later moved into a broader organizational effectiveness role, leading operating cadence, strategic planning, and employee engagement for an organization of 2,500-plus. She designed hybrid All-Hands experiences, rebuilt career development frameworks, and ran strategic planning for senior leadership. By the time she left in late 2024, she had spent nearly five years building the kind of organizational infrastructure that most companies only describe in slide decks.
The 36-Point Shift and the Work Behind It
In November 2024, Ling launched Stork & Spark. The premise was specific: ambitious, career-driven expectant parents were navigating one of the most consequential professional transitions of their lives with almost no structured support. They were disclosing pregnancies without strategy. They were writing parental leave plans without advocacy. They were returning to roles that no longer fit the people they had become.
The core insight behind Stork & Spark is not that parenthood is hard. Everyone knows that. The insight is that parenthood forces a values recalibration that most professionals never consciously complete. “We often start our career with a core set of values and make career decisions based on these,” Ling explains. “During and after the transition to parenthood, these values evolve, yet seldom do we intentionally revisit and revise them as a foundation for future decisions.”
The result, for many new parents, is a return to a role optimized for who they were before, not who they are now. Stork & Spark exists to close that gap before it opens.
The programming spans individual coaching, corporate cohorts, and organizational partnerships. In one Fortune 500 engagement, Ling partnered with a company to build a nine-month new parents coaching cohort. The program covered three pillars: identity and confidence as an expecting professional, integrated career planning across pregnancy, leave, and return, and the practical work of setting and holding boundaries during a major life transition. Participants in the program saw a 36 percentage point decrease in anxiety that having a baby would negatively impact their career progression. That is not a sentiment score. That is a measurable shift in how high-performing employees relate to their own futures inside an organization.
One participant in that cohort was the program manager herself, a senior leader within her company’s Parents Employee Resource Group, who discovered mid-design that she was expecting. Rather than stepping back, she applied the curriculum she had helped build to her own situation in real time. She took a lateral move to a new team under a new manager while pregnant, disclosed her pregnancy during the transition, negotiated her leave timeline, and secured increased travel flexibility for her return. “She didn’t just transform her own transition,” Ling notes. “She catalyzed an open culture of parenting out loud across her new team, normalizing flexibility and setting a new benchmark for everyone around her.”
Beyond individual outcomes, Ling has built what she calls a structured ecosystem for serendipity. She co-founded the Career Care Connection Summit, serves as Coach in Residence for the Society of Working Moms, and holds a location director role with The Parent Collective in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is also a member of Chief and the Harvard Business Review Advisory Council. Each of these affiliations is deliberate. She designs community spaces so that the right people can find each other organically, then actively bridges the connections that matter most.
What the Pause Was Always Pointing Toward
The companies that lose high performers after parental leave rarely understand why it happened. They see a resignation. Or worse – they let biases explain the story – “she’s less committed, she lost her ambition”. They run an exit survey. They file the feedback and move on. What they missed was the window, the months before leave when an employee was still present, still invested, still open to a conversation about what their career could look like on the other side of this transition.
Kelly Ling has spent years proving that the window is real, that it is actionable, and that organizations willing to invest in it see the results in retention, engagement, and the kind of leadership that only comes from people who know exactly what they value and why.
The pause, it turns out, was never really a pause at all.
Kelly Ling, ACC, is the founder of Stork & Spark, based in Lafayette, California. She coaches expectant and new parents at the intersection of parenthood and career identity, and partners with organizations to build programming that supports working parents through fertility, pregnancy, parental leave, and return to work. To connect with Kelly or learn more, visit linkedin.com/in/kellyling or storkandspark.com.
