Ask Me Anything - MeisterTask Senior Product Manager

As the Product Manager of MeisterTask, my only possible answer to this question is "Absolutely!" 😀

But from a more balanced point of view, I actually believe that the biggest opportunity for us as a company is to make sure that all of our products work well together and that our users can cover their workflow seamlessly — from ideation to execution and documentation — without needing to put one product "ahead" of any other.

On a similar note, we're very aware that our products often have different use cases, even within one company! Some users whose life evolves around MeisterTask work together with colleagues who spend most of their workday in MeisterNote, while still others work primarily in MindMeister. We need to be able to support all of them.

Love this question. For me, learning how to establish, respect and enforce my boundaries has been a hard lesson to learn. A few rules I follow:

- I don't check MeisterTask, Slack, or my email when I'm not at work. (i.e. after hours, during weekends, when on holiday, etc.)

I actually uninstall these apps when I'm on holiday, so my manager would need to call me on the phone if the house really were on fire. 😅 The other side of this coin is that when I work, I am very present. I don't scroll through cat videos or browse Instagram during work hours - not only because my work wouldn't get done, but also because mentally, my work time would spill over into my free time!

- When there's a situation where I have to choose between work and private life, my private life always comes first.

I always prioritize private commitments and promises over professional ones. For example, if I've promised my husband to be home by 7pm, but just as I'm about to leave I hear there's a really cool spontaneous work party going on in the office, I will go home. After all, I have committed to him for my whole life, and while I like my colleagues and love my job, they are (sadly) only passengers in my life and we will one day have to move on. It may seem harsh, I believe we make such consequential choices like this every day - making them based on instinct or mood may seem appealing in the moment, but this can cause pain down the road. I believe choices like this should be faced honestly!

This is a tricky one, as I probably have different proverbs for different parts of my life, and also for different times in my life.

- As a female leader, probably one of the biggest influences I've had was this quote from Cher which I came across in my late teens during the 90s: "Mom, I am the rich man". Suddenly it clicked for me: I really can achieve anything I want in life, even as a woman.

- As a Product Manager, one of my favorites comes from our own MeisterTask dashboard selection: "With self-discipline, most anything is possible," by Teddy Roosevelt. I'm a firm believer in incremental change and that consistency will always trump talent. I really do believe that true progress is achieved when we have the discipline to continue even when we don't feel motivated or inspired. For me, this is the secret (and pretty boring) sauce of success and excellence. 🍯

- In my personal life, the most influential and inspiring quote I've ever heard must be the "No" from Rosa Parks. It is much harder to say "no" than "yes" — to expectations, to injustice, to things that don't benefit us, just because we are trained by society to be "nice". Saying "no" often requires courage and bravery, or at the very least a certain degree of self-awareness. So when I don't feel comfortable saying "no", I often think that if she could do it, I can do it. Go, girl!