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...
Allgemein
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...
Pre-Mortem
A vital part of learning consists in looking back on our actions and reflecting in order to adjust our future behavior if needed. In product management, when everything goes to hell, we conduct what we call a post-mortem. It’s like a little funeral for a project, a feature or even a product where everyone gathers to discuss what went wrong and how to avoid this outcome in the future. (Actually, my product friend Sascha told me about a company that literally suits up in black and burries an actual prototype or product item close to their company building… 😉). While this is a valid and useful way to accelerate your learning curve, you still lost value which is especially painful when the stakes are high. In this...
Transitions
My summer was all "in between". In between ending and re-starting kindergarden. In between day trips, visiting relatives and even our first real camping get-away with the kids (which felt like five minutes at the lake wrapped in two days of packing and two days of unpacking...
Home
A few weeks ago I hired a cleaning lady. I thought the difficult part would be finding someone I trust who is efficient, autonomous and flexible. That part turned out to be quite easy. Within four days I had found a great match. The tough part, however, is figuring out whether I really want a stranger cleaning my house. Whether to put yet another fixed appointment in my calendar. Whether to let someone take a close look at each and every corner of a lovely, but pretty imperfect home. Not an easy taskf or me. It turns out I'm the kind of person who cleans before the cleaner...
True Colors
The greatest people I know are currently becoming the truest versions of themselves. M is spending a lot of time in prayer with Jesus, soaking herself in a feeling of love and belonging. J recently started a sexual liberation, entering unknown territory and tearing down the walls of monogamous relationships. L is slowly and steadily writing her way out of the business world into a place less polished and more true to her. E is no longer trying to please everyone at her own expense and S is radically rethinking the importance of her job, breaking the chains of perfectionism and unfruitful comparison, giving herself room to breathe. There is no one way of cutting through the noise of voices that are not our own. But whenever...
5 Stages of Grief
Today, I was supposed to board a plane to Morocco, to do some yoga with my dear friends Judith and Stefanie and to put some daylight between myself and my every-day life. Instead, this morning I had to go for a run in the *freaking* snow next to my house. I am surrounded by my every-day laundry and my every-day kids. For weeks, I had this feeling that something was about to go wrong with this trip. I have extensively been wearing face masks, got tested several times and planned every little detail about this trip. I am literally sitting on a perfectly packed suitcase with a negative PCR test, a triple-checked excel packing list and a pre-filled entry form for the airport in Morocco. The one tiny...