Alexandra Foerster

Alexandra FoersterAug 3, 2026

Vinted blocked me for the 3rd time. Spotify won’t let me subscribe to Premium. Moving to another country isn’t just about finding a home, opening a bank account or learning a new language. I’ve actually spent more years living outside my home country than in it. And one thing still surprises me every single time I move to a new country. It’s the hundreds of tiny things nobody warns you about. The kind of things that don’t make great stories, but quietly drain your time and energy. Last week alone: - Vinted blocked my account (again) because apparently living in Portugal with an Austrian phone number looks “suspicious.” - Spotify wouldn’t let me subscribe to Premium because it still remembered a free trial from another country, while at the same time asking me to change my country settings… again. - Keeping my daughter’s vaccination records up to date across countries often means manually piecing everything together because healthcare systems don’t share information. 👉 Every service seems to have its own rules about phone numbers, tax IDs, addresses, payment methods and where you’re “supposed” to live. None of these problems are huge. But together? They create a constant stream of friction. It’s the kind of invisible cognitive load people rarely talk about when they say, “You moved abroad? That must be amazing.” It is amazing. But it’s also a reminder that so many digital services and public systems are still designed for people whose lives happen in just one country. As more people build international careers, work remotely, or simply choose to live across borders, these experiences are becoming increasingly common. If you’re building products for a global world, this is worth remembering: The biggest frustrations often aren’t the big problems. They’re the hundreds of tiny ones. Have you ever lived abroad? What’s one small thing that turned out to be surprisingly complicated?

Alexandra FoersterJul 14, 2026

While helping several startups prepare their mid-year reviews, I realized I hadn’t done the same exercise for myself. So here it is. 👉 What worked: I finally wrote down my own mission. Something I ask every team to do, but never made time for myself. Half a year in, that’s done. 👉 What didn’t: Company Brain, the product we’re building, took longer than planned. I code the UI myself, on top of everything else, and that shows. We had to push one customer’s onboarding to end of July. 👉 What surprised me: switching between three languages in the same day became normal. I have direct conversations in German, write in English, and take calls in Hungarian, sometimes all before lunch. And here‘s what I keep seeing across the startups I work with, when it comes to mid-year reviews: 1️⃣ Goals get set just to have goals. If a goal never fed into the annual goals or the strategy, whether it’s hit or missed barely matters. That’s the biggest time waste in the whole process. 2️⃣ Most conversations only cover the WHAT, the performance goal itself, and skip the HOW. Usually because the company never defined values or behavioral competencies in the first place. There’s nothing to hold the HOW against. 3️⃣ Feedback stays vague. Managers default to “you did a good job” or “we should talk about your communication,” because they don’t have real examples in front of them, just impressions from six months ago. 4️⃣ Nobody can say clearly whether a goal was actually hit or missed. That’s not a performance problem, it’s a sign the goal wasn’t SMART enough to begin with. Time to rewrite it for the second half of the year, not let it slide again. So if you’re doing your mid-year check this month, ask yourself: ❓Does this goal actually connect to our annual goals or strategy? ❓Am I giving feedback on behaviors, not just on results? ❓Do I have real examples, not just a feeling, for the feedback I’m about to give? ❓Is it obvious, without me explaining, whether the goal was met? If you’re stuck on any of these, that’s the real work of this review season. Which one of these is costing your team the most right now? _________________________________ That’s exactly why we’re building Company Brain. Nobody should ever be surprised by a performance review. The evidence should accumulate throughout the year, not be reconstructed from memory two weeks before the conversation.

Alexandra FoersterJul 21, 2026

Your #JobDescription doesn’t know what success looks like. In every company I’ve worked with, corporate or startup, the job description gets written once, when the role needs to be advertised and sometimes glanced at again during onboarding. After that, nobody opens it again. It usually lists two things: the tasks the person will do, and the skills they need to bring. What it almost never says is what success in that role actually looks like, no result, no number, nothing to measure against later. That gap causes real problems later. Most people genuinely believe that finishing the list of tasks is the job. Nobody ever told them it isn’t. So they come into a salary conversation certain they’ve earned a raise and get frustrated when the answer is no, because from where they stand, they did everything that was asked of them. I use something called #OJR – Objective Job Results. Almost nobody I’ve worked with, corporate or startup, has heard of it. The idea: instead of listing tasks and skills for a job ad, you define one Objective per role, tied directly to the company goal, and 3 to 5 Results that can be backed by a number. Written as “delivers X, measured by Y”, not “responsible for…”. When that’s clear from day one, the salary conversation looks different too. Nobody is surprised in a review, because everyone already agreed, months earlier, on what “doing well” in this role actually means. The difference to OKRs: an OKR belongs to a team and runs on time, usually a quarter. An OJR belongs to a role and stays in place regardless of who holds it. That’s the difference between a company that grows and one that just gets bigger.