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...
I don’t know what’s going on lately and if it is only in my circle, but a lot of people seem to be going through a rough patch in their relationships. This made me think about nothing less than ...
Opt in, opt out - this was my mantra for 2022. I started it by deleting my entire newsletter base, giving all subscribers the opportunity to make a deliberate choice of whether or not to re-subscribe (still very thrilled so many of you came back :-) When we look at other people’s lives, we tend to see all the things they accomplished, but are missing most of the context on the price they paid, the opportunities they did not pursue or how they felt about their choices. While I am looking back on a very successful year at Product Academy, I want to shed some light on things I opted out on: at least 7 podcasts and 4 conferences I was invited to speak atcountless coffee chats...
Time flies… and there are two more butterfly editions I want to send out this year 😊 This one is all about the books that inspired me in 2022. So in case you are looking for Christmas gifts or holiday reads, here are the books that made it onto my shelf (or that I pulled out again after a while…): Bittersweet by Susan Cain: If you have a melancholic side, rank high on the sensitivity spectrum, or always had a feeling there might be something wrong with you for this deep sense of longing, this book is for you. It talks about sorrow and longing and its connection to creativity, about grief and inherited pain. I will admit it sometimes feels a bit repetitive and could...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...