Family OKRs
déformation professionelle is a quite common thing chez Schluer-Lau ;-) Our entrance door is a giant Kanban board. We constantly run experiments on our lives (and the kids...
Personal Blog Posts
Being a solopreneur can feel quite lonely. So can being a mother, a product person, a highly-sensitive individual… I made it my mission to bridge the gap between my professional and my private life to show up as authentically and whole-heartedly as I can, inviting others to connect with me from human to human. In this section you can check out extracts from my personal newsletter „Tanja’s Butterflies“.
To follow my product-related writing, I recommend subscribing to my Substack blog Learning Organisation. Some of my articles can also be found in the section Publications & Templates.
Fuse
I am writing to you from a hotel room in Amsterdam where I concluded a week that did not go according to plan. My daughter caught scarlet fever, my son had some weird rash on his belly that we needed to observe for a while - all of this while my husband was on a business trip. My son’s birthday was accompanied by a lot of tantrum and - of course - at work lots of stuff was piling up… My fuse was getting shorter by the minute, and I ended up yelling at the kids way more often than I should have. Now that I am sitting here after a good night’s sleep, a work-out and great talks with my friend Isa, I am back to...
Circus
One week ago Tobias and me went to see the Cirque du Soleil in Zurich - and seven days later I am still buzzing with joy and excitement about their show. We have been listening to the LUZIA soundtrack non-stop, even the kids requested we play it first thing in the morning...
Showing Up
The other day it took my new friend Cem about a week to reply to my message. "So I wanted to reply right away after your message but I realized I did not know the answer to the question how I am doing", he told me once he got back to me. The simplest questions are often the deepest. How are you?A question we are used to ask and being asked a tousend times per year, often not even taking more than a split second to think about our reply. It's only when we know the other person is in deep pain that we suddenly hesitate to even ask. When they just lost their job, their partner or even their child it suddenly feels uncomfortable, shallow...
Debt
Back in the days when I was still actively managing products like e-commerce shops, I used to be worried about what we call tech debt all the time. It's a certain kind of risk you accumulate for prioritizing short-term goals (like releasing new features) over long-term stability (like test coverage and refactoring).Nowadays, to me there are two kinds of debt: the one that I can happily ignore for now - which in our case is the loan we took out when we bought our house. I am quite confident that one way or another we will be able to pay back this money someday and it does not keep me up at night. What does affect my sleep is the second kind of debt. The one...