tanja(at)tanjalau.com

+41 (0)32 511 20 09

Bern, Switzerland

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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.

Freedom

In school there were few subjects I really hated, but somehow physics ended up being one of them. Therefore when my husband (who is a railway engineer) starts talking about anything too techy, my brain instantly wants to shut off. The other night, however, we ended up talking about the "degree of freedom" which apparently is a thing in physics ;-) I even looked it up: "In physics, the degrees of freedom (DOF) of a mechanical system is the number of independent parameters that define its configuration or state." (Wikipedia) Please bear with me ;-) So in a nutshell, what I took away from the article is the question: in which directions is a body able to move? (Physicists, don't hate me for this rather naive summary...

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Metamorphosis

Lately I have been falling asleep with the kids around 8 pm on a regular basis. During the day, my head is foggy and I am low on energy. I heard that some of you are experiencing the same. To me it feels like I am currently pupating in a little cocoon of mine. The other day I was talking about this with my dear friend Eva and we were joking around: At the end of this crisis, are we going to turn into beautiful butterflies or just come out as really fat and hairy caterpillars? :-)In any case, the pandemic is making me crawl back inside myself. And what I found there is my seven-year-old self, snuggled into a blanket reading everything she could get her...

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Good-bye 2020, hello 2021. Chasing butterflies!

2020 – you’ve been a hell of a year. Untamed, weird and challenging. Throwing us back on ourselves. Showing us what is means to not take anything for granted. Digging up so much hate and love in mankind, forcing us to show our true colors, values and vulnerability. Those of you who read my review of 2019 know that I had set two focus areas for myself in 2020: Holism: Digging deeper into how everything in life is connected. Detoxing: letting go of beliefs and habits (maybe also people) that are not fueling my energy and matching my values.   Looking back, I am happy that I managed to integrate both topics into my learning journey this year, although partly in other ways than I had anticipated. Holism is a concept...

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Good-bye, 2019: lots of changes, lots of great new people in my life.

With every call of life, the heart must be ready to part and start again, in courage and joy, surrendering to new, otherly liasons, as In the core of every beginning lives magic Magic that protects us and helps us live. Hermann Hesse, Stufen   2019 has been a year of fresh starts. Most of them have been quite familiar from the past: moving houses, starting new jobs, even having a newborn at home. However, as Heraclit says: “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.” So by reliving many moments from the past in an entirely new context, I learned a lot this year:   Being a mom of two, does not equal kids x 2, but kids2: Like every...

Good-bye 2018, Hello 2019 – Moving on.

Good-bye siroop! Finding closure What a ride it has been. After joining this audacious company as one of the very first employees in 2015, I decided to quit my position as Head of Product at siroop at the end of 2017. I had dedicated all my passion and a considerable chunk of my time to building this new marketplace in Switzerland. Over 200 siroopies, hundreds of merchants and more than 350'000 customers had joined us along the way. However, after commuting three hours a day, managing daycare logistics and organizing a wedding, I realized it was time to get my priorities straight and spend more quality time with my family. Leaving siroop was hard. I had found wonderful friends, sparring partners and talented team mates there. We fought together, we made...

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