One Year as a Mentor
How It Started
I still remember my conversation with my former manager, Aurora Gómez Cabezas. It was at our annual performance development session. We were chatting about the stuff I did well, the stuff I failed and need to improve. It was close to the end of the session and she told me if I want to grow from a good leader to a great leader I should be more vocal outside of my organization.
That task was a tough one. As a technical person, it is not easy to be more vocal. As a no social media platform user, it is not easy to be more visible. I only use Linkedin. From time to time on Linkedin I see people posting “hey I attended this conference and here is the picture”, “another tbt of a successful working day” and “this is a screenshot of how I debug my Python code” kinda stuff. That is not for me, thanks!
During that time I was already mentoring Software Engineers, Data Scientists, Data Analysts, and Product Managers in my organization. I wasn’t doing this for the sake of “mentoring”. As a senior leader, it was an organic decision for me.
One day my wife asked me why I am not doing mentoring outside of my organization voluntarily. I have never thought this was an option to be more vocal outside of my organization and be useful to others. It was the moment that changed my life.
How It Became a Reality
In the past, I took mentoring sessions from executive leaders at The Mentoring Club as a mentee. So I was familiar with the platform and its core vision. In the meantime, the platform was growing and supporting thousands around the globe. So I made my choice. Time to pay back!
In the beginning, it was a huge challenge for me to meet people I don’t know or I didn’t work with. Also, I didn’t know what kind of questions they can ask you during the call.
If I was going to meet with data scientists and AI researchers, I was reviewing Chip Huyen Machine Learning System Design notes, or if I was going to meet with data engineers, I was checking the latest Airflow updates or Kafka broker systems, or if I was going to meet with software engineers, I was checking micro-service architecture design patterns 😂 All efforts were to be prepared to answer any question that I can face. These helped me be up to date, but I didn’t use them during the sessions.
What People Seek at Mentoring
While I am writing this article Cassie Kozyrkov posted a short video to announce a new training on soft skills. It approves me that this is the core problem in our data domain, not the technical stuff.
For me, it was a surprise that no one paid attention to technical topics during our sessions. I had only 2–3 sessions where people brought their business-related technical problems to me. All the remaining sessions were about soft skills-related challenges. I also want to highlight that most of my mentees were from the data domain. Maybe for software engineers, it can be a different story. Based on my experiences here are the top three questions I faced;
1- How to Be a Data Leader?
We have tons of technical courses available on the internet from data modeling to debugging TensorFlow codes. But we don’t have any guidance on how a Senior Data Person becomes a Data Leader.
For the software engineering domain, this is rather a simpler problem since more than 90% of the roles are either Backend, Fullstack, or Frontend Engineers. So the natural next step is either being a Principal Engineer or Engineering Manager.
For the data domain, almost every role is new. We have more than 20 different roles today. Not every one of them has a chance to be represented as a leader in the organization. In this scenario we face some challenging questions; how will people choose the correct path to grow in leadership, how their leaders are going to guide them for the future when there is no clear path, when there is no leadership role in their current job title in the market what you are going to do, what is needed to be a data leader, and should I learn every technical aspect of the modern data stack?
This is not an easy question and depending on the mentee’s career aspirations, skills, and motivation this can change. Most of the time I end up convincing mentees to talk with their managers about their aspirations which always is the best place to start.
2- How to Role Play as a Product Manager?
This is the most frustrating subject that I hear from data people. Why are they asked to manage stakeholders, create roadmaps, and prioritize initiatives? They have a point because we don’t ask this of software engineers. Software engineers don’t join weekly stakeholder meetings, they don’t meet with designers on how they should design the upcoming initiatives, they don’t plan the OKRs, etc.
Basically, we are asking data people to role-play as product managers. Is this fair? No. Is this reality? Yes. Is it going to change in a recent time frame? No. Then you have nothing to do. As a data person, you need to invest in your product manager skills and take on these responsibilities. Of course, there is another happy path that you convince your manager/ leader to hire a Data Product Manager (PM).
3- How to Change Roles in Data Domain?
The data domain is really good at populating new roles every single day. At some point, people can’t stop thinking about whether it is needed or not, or does this role have a future. I am pretty sure we are going to create the ChatGPT AI Engineer, or something more absurd, title in the upcoming months! If there is enough demand, we should answer with the supply, right?
When there is enough hype and various organizations are fueling the marketing efforts, it is becoming confusing for data people; Data Engineers want to be Data Scientists, Data Scientists want to be Product Managers, and Product Managers want to be Data Analysts. The list goes and goes.
At this stage, we need to distinguish biased salary reports or happiness posts on social media, from reality. The same title in the same organization at different teams can have different experiences. Everything is relative. We should stop comparing oranges and apples, sometimes the green apples from the red ones!
How It is Evolving
What I observed during the mentoring sessions was everyone asking similar questions and I don’t have enough time to meet with everyone. In order to be more vocal to a broader audience I started to write on Medium.
I consider Medium blog posting as a form of mentoring. Not personalized as I can at the mentoring sessions but I can deep dive into different subjects which may not even be thought of by some mentees as questions. In this regard, I am balancing my posts between data leadership, data science, data analytics, and other fields in the data domain so people can choose the related one according to their needs.
Thanks to these efforts I met with great people like Chad Sanderson who convinced me to be part of the Data Quality Camp community as a moderator to support more than 4000 people on various data topics.
Conclusion
In the conclusion, I want to share the key takeaways I observed in the last year;
- In order to be a successful mentor, you need to be a lifelong mentee. You have to learn new things and combine them with your past experiences to give better directions.
- Meeting new people all over the globe, and hearing different perspectives on similar problems pushes me to think about how similar and local problems we are trying to succeed.
- The data domain has too many soft skill problems! Not only for developers but also for leaders. In the future, I assume this is going to be a major not getting proper investment from C-suite, not being appreciated in the organizations despite hard efforts, and being a blocker for long-term employee retention.
- Every leader should invest in mentoring to improve their core skills; listening, empathy, and problem-solving. The majority of the mentees brought me subjects that they should talk about with their leaders openly. It highlights that data leaders only focus on the technical aspect of their roles.
Thanks a lot for reading 🙏
I hope you enjoyed my one-year retrospective about the mentoring experience.
If you want to get in touch, you can find me on Linkedin and Mentoring Club!
