Interview Series with Designers - Marit

(Originally posted Jan 30, 2017)

Berlin in Germany has a special place in my heart and just like that Marit Brademann stumbled into my SoCal life at an event of the UCSD Design Lab. Looking back, her unassuming and likeable vibes stood out about her, as well as her German “punk” uniform, i.e. black hoodie and pants, no brands, and minimal girliness.

Since then, I learned a lot from Marit about Berlin, about the secret and the obvious design firms in the German capitol, and about her German perspective on design in San Diego. Marit attended our Design Your Life workshop series in October. She had been a motivated participant who was keen to learn about herself through the design lens.

When I invited Marit to my interview series, I learned a tremendous amount from her, the social scientist and scrum master, as I leaned back and let her tell her design and gender stories. Now lean back as well to learn from an impressive professional, who is roaming both continents and has an empowering vision for us all.

Marit’s social media photo

Marit Brademann — fighting for ideas & empowering people

JL: Welcome to my interview series tackling gender in the design profession. Why don’t you outline your line of work for me?

MB: I am a software project manager focusing on product and software teams, and I have a user experience (UX) background rather than a software background.

JL: For people that are new to the UX, software, and product world, what’s a good example or breakdown of what you do? What does a good software and design manager do?

MB: If someone has an idea for something or of what something should do, I help this person figure out what the big steps are to achieve this goal. This means breaking down the idea into small parts and implementing the idea from the small parts back to the whole thing.

JL: For context, where have you been working?

MB: I have been working mostly in Berlin for the past years, in a UX agency, in corporations like Axel Springer, and in the startup world, like Groupon.

JL: What are typical tasks and challenges in your day to day if you think of previous jobs?

MB: I can think of something that happened recently where it was a big challenge to encourage a product owner (the guy who has the idea) to make his idea explicit, to reveal the layers of his intention, and to define what was inside the goal. This was necessary to hand it to those people that actually make something concrete out of it. Most of my challenges are communication challenges, “How do you help people make things explicit?”. I need to support the person who is owning the product in getting other people to work for him. In this instance, the product owner basically did not trust his developers, as in “They are just developers. It’s enough if I give them 2–3 words, because they are thinking in code and not in prose.” That was a big challenge for me! I managed to be a moderator between those fronts and to say “Hey, if you don’t give people more context, then they cannot build something awesome for you.”

At another agency, the challenge was always that the client started developing much earlier than when we delivered the concept. Once they made the idea into something tangible and once we received feedback, we learned whether the idea that we had been conceptualising was actually feasible. Unfortunately that feedback often came very late, so that we sometimes had to change the concept 3–6 months after we had initially conceptualised everything. We found out then, that the initial concept was not working with their backend and their marketing strategies.

JL: You describe clearly communication and relationship challenges such as trust issues and perspective taking. You tell us that you can only get the best out of your team if you know your team well, and are aware of team members’ skills. There also seem to have been challenges around timing; whether you get and receive input at the right time. In all these tasks, is there a template for how do act in your role? Is it like building a new city that has not been there before?

MB: Actually, I am operating in this scrum framework that defines events and artefacts. It helps to have a footprint like this. Hence, I can build trust and focus on time sensitive coordination to accomplish something that everyone can refer to. A trained scrum master does not come in and says “I have an idea on how to tackle this problem!”. Instead, it is a stance of “I know that this works and let’s dot it.”

JL: A scrum master uses a proven framework that people need to agree on.

MB: Yeah, it is a scheme that should be used in an agile way. It is agile which means that it is adaptive. However, some managers may say, “If it’s agile, we can do whatever we want.” Which is when I clarify “This is not how we interpret this.” It is also part of my job to say, “I have the right clue of how much room there is for interpretation and how much there is not. So trust me on that and let’s go in baby steps to use what we have on the template and integrate it with the needs of our company.” And that mean a lot of struggle with middle or higher management.

JL: That sounds to me as if you need to have a certain type of confidence, sufficient knowledge, and experience with the process. And that gives you what you need. Do you step into the role of a coach then?

MB: It is a bit of both. It depends on what environment you are in, what they expect you to do, and what they expect you to fight for or not. The scrum master role, in my opinion, is a lot about fighting for something. And it is not a very technical job; it actually is a people’s job. You have many conversations and fights to fight. You have to convince people almost like in a guerrilla fight. You have to employ team work and think, “We can do something amazing” with the senior managers, and “We need to stop them from micromanaging.” I am much more into trusting individuals and less into the structure itself. I like empowering people which is a strong blueprint in the scrum approach.

JL: This is helpful especially since you added your take on the scrum master role. I asked you earlier for examples of your day-to-day. And you gave great examples of aiding people to be more self-governed and less micromanaged.

MB: Let me add to the comparison between a scrum master versus a coach. I like the coaching aspect of scrum mastering. I enjoy getting into the deeper aspects of this framework. That’s what these events, artefacts, and so on are there for. They are there for a reason, and not just for fun alone. I would love to attain more coaching skills myself and make things more tangible. I can imagine using storytelling in meetings or even using role plays. I find it very exciting to believe in the transformational power of the scrum framework. Originally I learned about all this from another cool woman in Berlin, her name is Fanny. She basically brought me to the path of a scrum master. I was initially tasked with quality assurance and belonged in the scrum team itself then. At some point, when I was looking for work, she called me and said, “Hey, there is a really cool agency here and I think you are actually a really good fit for a scrum master position.” So I was thrown into the cold water and had team meetings on the first day. I had to moderate everything and improvise. I have been in this role from that day on and I realise more and more how much this kind of role is needed, not just for software or UX designers, but in other parts of companies as well. The goal is to integrate not only departments, but visional thinking on what teams are working on.

JL: I keep thinking in metaphors to match your experience with what I know. So is the scrum master like a design doula — someone who is helping with birthing ideas? Is it someone that is a guide on a hike — someone that is guiding the process to go well?

MB: Yeah, in some development departments, I would say I am a teacher for agile children. In the user experience agency USEEDS, for instance, where people grew up very fast, there was a point after a year and a half where my importance diminished because the teams were so empowered and agile, that they needed only very little support in the end.

JL: So ideally you become superfluous?

MB: Yeah, that is the vision of a scrum master — that she makes herself self-redundant.

JL: There are so many directions where I want to take this. Yet my focus for this series has been on gender. What difference does gender make in your experience?

MB: Hum… it depends on the focus of the product development. I can only speak from the UX agency experience where gender was not really at all an issue or topic. In my experience, there were about 50% men and 50% women. Teams were simply mixed. Yet in the development environment, the male percentage is much higher. I would not necessarily say that gender is a big topic for me to be aware of. All I can say is when a lot of guys are working together, or when a lot of women are working together, a specific group dynamic develops. It makes it difficult, say if 10 to 20 guys are in the room, to get to the metaphorical underwear of the issue.

JL: They don’t get to the underwear?!?

MB: They don’t get to the underwear! They often don’t ask “What is this really about?” They miss asking, “Why are we doing this?”, “How can we solve this?” With men, everyone is just like “Okay, I have this idea. “ — “Okay, let’s do it like that.” Or if you have two guys that have two strong ideas, it may be just a back and forth, and nothing is going to happen in the end. Whereas in mixed teams, communication tends to be more fluid. There is this empathy thinking, it is already naturally coming up, as in — I guess men and women have learned throughout life that women speak differently to men, and make issues tangible by comparison when they speak to each other. For example, when I am talking to you about menstrual cramps, you most likely know exactly what I am talking about whereas when I am talking to a guy, I have to use different language, be more explicit and can assume less. I think that is what makes communication in mixed teams so much more tangible. Because people are used to explaining themselves to the “other” in mixed teams. Again, I would not blame it on gender alone. It is rather an issue of being different. Actually, I have to think about this more. Yet the gender thing is very complex and real.

JL: It is complex. And you have been sharing great anecdotes that shed light for me on these issues that I am attempting to sort better. You help me to understand aspects of it. You gave the example of an all-men team. How about an all-women team? Is there a typical dynamic?

MB: At the moment I am working in pro-bono all-women team to serve refugees better. We are five women. In the beginning, I was a bit jealous of another woman who was assigned the leader role. I wondered “Why didn’t anyone ask me?” And I was almost searching for mistakes she was doing. I initially failed at thinking like a team player but she is great and I called myself to order. Yet, in this team, I did not encounter any weird things such as someone feeling entitled to say something, or someone taking the decision for others. It was very rational.

JL: That is very honest and interesting. And it is human to size your peers up to understand where we stand ourselves. Again, I mean to collect these examples as anecdotal information and to refrain from generalisations (and I yet may be accused of it). So this is what you have experienced. This is what comes up when you are roaming your mind. Are there any other instances and stereotypes with regards to gender including what you heard other people say?

MB: To come back to this product owner that I mentioned before. What I realized with this person just as a couple of people around him did, is this kind of phenomenon where men have the capacity to sell themselves even if they are much less qualified than their female counterparts. They somehow figured out and they know how to ignore the fact that they are not qualified enough so they just talk nonsense and get the job. I asked myself, “How can a person like that get a job like that. We are doing the groundwork for the company, establishing a scrum process in that case, and he just runs over any attempt for improvement.” What he did was that he kept saying “I don’t want to write specific information in the ticket because developers don’t read it anyway.”

JL: This is an anecdote and yet it seems to show that sometimes gender gets you ahead in the game. Does it exemplify how you can get ahead with a certain confidence?

MB: Another example comes from my recent company, which might seem like just another coincidence but I think it is actually not. It is the example of the weekly Cake Thursday. Guess who was baking the cake each week?

JL: The women perhaps?

MB: Every Thursday at 4pm, we were asked to bake cakes in a team of two at the company to then have it as a team.

JL: Why does this example come to your mind?

MB: I asked them, “Is this time taking away from your work time? How do you decide who will be baking those cakes? How is it announced?” And they answered that employees could volunteer, and that they may work a little less. I have the feeling that women do not see their work as important and fruitful as men do, so they think that instead of working two more hours and producing good code and contributing to the product, the female coders, would say “It is not so important. I can contribute to the well-being of the company by baking cake.”

JL: This then reminds me of a female co-worker who gave me the solid advice to never wash the dishes voluntarily at work. It was not to say “Never wash your cup”, yet rather to say “Never fall into the role of washing the dishes that are standing in the sink.”

MB: It is a bit like that.

JL: Where do you see some easy fixes for the issues that came up today?

MB: For instance with the cake baking, I would suggest that the leadership should encourage their employees to mix up teams so that men also can shine in the role of baking cake — and that women remain at their desktop to code. Beyond that it is a whole educational undertaking that cannot be solved quickly. These examples are just symptoms, they are mere peaks of the iceberg.

JL: Perhaps you have observed good solutions at other companies and can share about that.

MB: No. Sorry.

JL: What is your message for people that are struggling and experiencing scenarios like the ones you do?

MB: Speak up, have good peers, and talk to your scrum master about it. I realised that my role as a scrum master also develops more and more into that of a female team leader. I see what impact I have on my female team members who may say “I am not good enough for this. I don’t qualify.” where they could say “Maybe the role is not good enough for me.”

JL: It’s a thing I hear often, too.

MB: It would be great to install a sense of community and a sense that you are not alone with these thoughts and doubts. Which also starts with good education. Same goes for at home: You don’t have to be perfect. A friend actually pointed me to this TED talk by Reshma Saujaniwho talking about perfectionism and about how girls do not have to be perfect. I am not a big fan of the entire talk as it makes the argument “Girls need to stop worrying about perfectionism for the sake of our economy.” For me, it is not always about the economy. She brings up the differences in how girls and boys are raised.

JL: Your conclusion then is “You might not be perfect for a role, yet that’s okay. Or check better whether the role is a good fit for you. And you emphasise that if things come up, you need to talk to your peers or scrum master. And the TED talk is wonderful resources to end this conversation with.

Thank you Marit!

I chose to transcribe and minimally polish my conversations so that you as my reader get a better feel for the interviewees. In this instance, I wonder whether you could sense Marit’s drive and passion to empower team players in software and product teams. She seems to fully invest herself to bring team players together, minimise the communication gaps, and address trust issues with product managers to allow visional thinking to materialise in better outcomes.

Alike other interviewees, Marit set out by saying something like “There are no gender issues” and then started to list them. What’s that all about? It is like answering “I am fine!” before you dive into sharing about your struggles and joys. And alike other interviewees, Marit confirms that the gender issue is real and complex. Yes, so good reason to continue the challenging work of speaking with many and more designers to allow you to study their answers, provide feedback on these findings, and take this further.

Marit described an example where a male product manager benefitted from a male positive gender stereotype. Unfortunately, he did not meet the expectations of the team and sadly, he lacked the humble stance of grateful “always learning”. Instead of taking men (or women) in assumed roles down, we can contribute to a company culture where we address the obvious discrepancy, and allow people to grow without loosing their face. I wonder if Marit considered to speak with Mr. Imposter. And I wish that women (and men) would fake a little more to create positions in which they are forced and asked to live up to their promise.

A simple take home message from this interview is that gender stereotypical behavior occurs in seemingly liberal and egalitarian work environments. Marit shared about Cake Thursday, and I confessed that I washed dishes for the team and needed to be told not to. Just how exactly can you both shine for caring for your company and eat the cake while not being cast into the mother role? Maybe screw in light bulbs, too, meaning you are balancing gender stereotypical behavior? Maybe we talk about it differently which can start so early in life? “Hey Peter, where did you go shopping this weekend?” And “Linda, what did you fix in your free time?”

After all, this is meant as food for thought and as a spark to have you light and burn for more.

Her website: http://ideasandnumbers.com/