Strategy Sync October 2026

Every six months, we swap our office in Bern for a chalet for a few days. This time we headed to Chamonix with a clear goal: fewer slides, more results that are still alive the Monday after.

Golden light on the Aiguille du Midi, seen through a chalet roof window — 45.92° N · 6.87° E
Chamonix-Mont-Blanc

Thursday: Arrival, a Big Shop and a Look Back

We left the Natron office at midday on Thursday. Coop@home simply isn't available in France, so the first item on the agenda was a big grocery shop. It took quite a while, and at the till we even had to pay twice because we had hit the item limit.

A team member in a car park holding a very long supermarket receipt — Jan and the long receipt.

After the shopping and settling into our rooms, we had a first apéro, prepared by Jan Fuhrer and Nicolo Lüscher. David Räz and Jan Lauber then set out the programme. Their aim was that everyone knows which results should be on the table by Sunday.

The chalet in the evening light, with the peaks of the Mont Blanc massif behind it

After some very good fajitas, the evening closed with a look back. Where do we stand since the last Strategy Sync in April, and what did we actually put into practice from Veysonnaz?

Friday: Memos Instead of Presentations

Friday belonged to the memos. As in April, everyone wrote a one-page memo on People & Culture beforehand.

The idea: a presentation leaves plenty of room for interpretation, a memo forces clear thinking. Everyone read every memo, took notes and then discussed them together along three questions:

What has improved since the last Strategy Sync?
What do we still need to work on?
How am I doing?

In the afternoon, work started on the individual assignments. Everyone picked a topic and pitched it in 30 seconds. After an apéro came the all-hands update with Jan Lauber, David Räz and our board member Dave Grissim. A red curry rounded off the evening.

Working on an individual assignment by the window

Two team members working on a laptop by the window

Saturday: The Individual Assignments

Unlike in April, we didn't work in topic groups but on individual assignments. Everyone picked a topic from day-to-day work that had been on their mind for a while. We had two hours to work out first solutions, then presented our results to the team.

Customer environments in one go: Building a new customer environment currently takes more than 20 separate, manually started automation runs and three to five hours. The goal is a one-shot deployment.
A leaner GitOps workflow: A new flow with monthly releases should cut down on laborious cherry-picks between our environments.
Secure Cloud Access: A concept for controlling access to our platform even more precisely and traceably per customer.
Contingency plan: Clear procedures and prepared tools for a longer outage, so that we act rather than improvise when it counts.
Prioritising vulnerabilities by risk: Rules for which new CVEs are urgent, plus five quick wins and a small package each month until April 2027.
Better maintenance communication: Building on the hackathon prototype "Maintenance Notifier", maintenance announcements for our customers should become simpler and more reliable.

Team members discussing an assignment on a laptop

By the afternoon the work was done, and the rest of the weekend belonged to the team.

Sunday: Recap and the Trip Home

Over the last breakfast, we looked back on the three days together one last time. The focus was on next steps: who drives which topic forward, and by when?

At 10 o'clock we handed back the chalet and set off for Bern.

More Than Just Strategy

Once again, cooking together, morning workouts, board games and long evenings were part of the Strategy Sync. And this time, earplugs were on the packing list in bold.