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.

Curiosity

“Don’t be nosy.”“Don’t ask stupid questions.”Curiosity killed the cat – they say. There was a point in my childhood where I shifted from asking lots of questions to expecting myself to figure things out by myself. The Encarta encyclopedia (who still rembers the good old CD-ROM?) turned into one of my best friends. I refused to eat with chopsticks instead of admitting that I had no clue how to use them. When someone asked my if I had read a certain book, I'd rather say yes and hope I'd get through with it than asking what it was about. At that time, I would never have guessed that one day running classes about product discovery would become my bread and butter – let alone that I would...

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1% – Drifting into Failure

A little scratch on the leg, maybe a dry nostril that cracked open just a tiny bit - we will never know what caused my husband’s leg to develop a severe bacterial infection last week. Despite several visits to the doctors and even a check-up at the hospital, the unlucky combination of his symptoms manifesting with delay in his blood results, Tobi’s eagerness to make his ski holidays count and medical practitioners not laying out the possible range of scenarios to pay attention to led to two surgeries and a week at the hospital. I couldn’t help but notice the parallels to a book I am currently reading, called Drift into Failure (see section below for my review). Our bodies are in fact living organisms that represent...

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Poetry

My first true love was ink on paper. Letters lined up neatly on a piece of paper. The smell of a new book. Sentences scribbled into carefully hidden notebooks to caputure a fleeting feeling. I was, am and always will be in love with books. Since I was a kid, I would pour my heart and soul out on paper - just to find it again in someone else's writing. In fact, I got so obsessed with certain books that I would hide them from my sister, afraid that by reading them she might be able to take a sneak peek into the deepest chambers of my soul...

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Home

32 days 52 minutes and 17 seconds - that's how long it took me to get sick. The kids were the first ones, then Tobias started complaining. I thought I'd never be affected. But it turns out: even I can get really sick. I'm not talking about the infamous Bali belly (that one tormented the whole family, too...

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Ready for Take-off

Our two-month sabbatical in Bali is just around the corner - and if my family had not been stopping me, I would have been fully packed weeks ago 🙂 I guess how we pack and prepare for trips says a lot about our personality and I loved chatting about this with many people in my network in the past couple of weeks. Just for fun, I tried to condense the patterns I spotted into 7 packing archetypes.  1 - MAMA BEAR Main goal: make sure everyone on the trip is fully taken care ofPacking strategy:starts washing and shopping at least a week in advancepacks for everyone in the family, including pre-planning what shoe size the kids are going to have during the trip in four monthspacks enough food to feed...

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