How to Decode the Process of Finding a Mentor — An Event by Advancing Women in Product (AWIP)
Credits: Advancing Women in Product Team — Kelly Hoover, Nancy Wang, and Aakrit Prasad
Having a mentor can make all the difference in exponential career growth — providing key insights, support, feedback, and acting as an advocate to help you achieve your professional goals.
On August 28th, AWIP kicked off its inaugural mentorship program with an event sponsored by Yelp on how to decode the mentoring process. This event featured a panel of product managers and mentorship advocates — Yue Wu (Group Product Manager at Yelp), Soundarya Chandar (Product Manager at Yelp), and Albert Chen (Sr. Product Manager at AdRoll).
Below are key insights and tips from the interactive panel to help you decode different stages of the mentorship process:
Figuring out what you want out of your mentorship
There are so many ways that a mentor can positively impact your life. To make sure you have the best mentorship experience possible, it can be helpful to first figure out what kind of outcome you’re looking for from a mentor. Here are just a few of the different things that our panel thought mentors can bring to the table:
Domain Expertise
Through observation and discussions with a mentor that has expertise in a domain you are interested in, you can develop specific skill sets, industry insights, and practical methodologies to accelerate your career.
Sponsorship
By sharing your professional goals and ideas with a mentor that acts as a sponsor, you can get feedback and advocacy to achieve those goals.
Soft Skills
Soft skills and personal growth can be just as important as domain expertise. Finding a mentor whose leadership, thought process, or work ethic you admire can help you to emulate that behavior in a professional setting.
No matter what outcome you’re looking for, it can be beneficial to both you and your mentor if you are clear and intentional about what you need to succeed!
How to find a mentor
Finding a mentor is less challenging than you think. There are many different approaches to identifying someone who inspires you. In many cases, your future mentor may already be a part of your life. Here are a couple ways to find your next mentor:
Former Managers/Co-Workers
Perhaps your company recently reorganized your corporate structure, you changed jobs, or you are no longer working with your former manager/team members for one reason or another. This is a great opportunity to identify a mentor who knows you and your abilities extremely well without either of you having to worry about speaking candidly about your current work.
Inspirational Thought Leaders
One of our panelists found an informal mentor by approaching one of her favorite bloggers after an event she attended. If you’re inspired by a thought leader, reach out to them about work that you admire. They may not have the capacity to be a long-term or formal mentor, but instead could open up other doors for you to invest in your personal growth or connect you with other potential mentors.
Peers
You may already have a mentor in your life without knowing it! As put by one of our panelists, “some of the best mentors can simply be friends who are better at something.”
What to look for in a mentor
Some mentors are better than others. Luckily, there are a few beneficial qualities you can look for in a mentor to set your relationship up for success:
Hunger to Improve
If the end goal of your mentor relationship is to improve professionally, you want to look for someone hungry to improve themselves so that you can grow with them.
Humility
Someone who is humble will have real conversations at your level and will allow the focus of those conversations to be on your aspirations and growth.
Connection
It’s important to be comfortable having truly casual conversations with your mentor. Having a connection that allows you to speak candidly about your needs, goals, and fears will help you get the most out of this relationship.
Adjacency
Our panelists agreed that real time feedback is the best feedback you can get. By discovering a mentor in an adjacent team or role to something you’re doing, you’ll be able to request and receive real time feedback without having to worry about that individual’s contribution to what you’re trying to accomplish.
How to ask someone to be your mentor
Formalizing your mentorship can help to ensure you’re getting the type of support you need to reach your goals. The best way to formalize your mentorship and clearly communicate your expectations is to simply ask your potential mentor… to be your mentor!
Just ask!
It can be daunting to approach someone and ask them to make the commitment of becoming your mentor. Just remember that the worst possible outcome — they say “no” — isn’t all that bad. It’s important not to feel rejected.
This outcome does not reflect poorly on you in any way, in fact it can actually have a positive impact on your relationship with this person. Asking someone to be your mentor is another way of saying “you’re an inspirational person in my life, who I appreciate and would like to learn more from.”
Also, if they decline, this can be the perfect opportunity to solicit suggestions for other potential mentors in their role or industry, taking you one step closer to finding the right mentor for your needs.
Offer Support
If you have the capacity to take on extra responsibilities, another way to engage a potential mentor is by offering your professional support. This way you can gain skills or insight into a different career path or industry while helping the person you’re hoping to learn from.
How to maintain a mentorship
Once you’ve found a mentor, it’s important to put the time and effort into sustaining your relationship. Our panelists provided a couple of tips to help you maintain a helpful and productive mentor relationship:
Regular Meetings/Correspondence
Every mentorship has a different timeline, cadence, and lifespan. These are all up to you and your mentor to decide as best fits your communication practices and lifestyles. Our panelists agreed the best way to sustain a mentorship is to have regular meetings or correspondence focused on professional or personal growth.
Refer Your Mentors To Others
Most likely, you won’t meet with your mentor regularly for the rest of your life. Referring your mentors to be mentors of others is a great way to grow your circle, become closer with current mentors, and reach back out to any mentors you may have fallen out of touch with in the past.
Hopefully this article helped to decode the process of finding a great mentor to accelerate your career growth and path to success! If you’re interested in jumpstarting your mentorship experience specifically in Product Management, feel free to check out the new AWIP Mentorship Program.
The 2018 AWIP Mentorship Program is a multi-faceted mentorship program that provides an intimate network of fellow product managers and exclusive access to group meet-ups and discussions with seasoned product managers. The program will run from August to December 2018.
The Mentorship Program officially kicked off on August 28th but if you are interested in joining please sign up for the waitlist here. We will be matching members from the waitlist to groups throughout the program.
Stay connected with AWIP:
- Sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter updates
- Join us for our next event “AWIP Presents: Cloud SaaS Products for Hyperscale”
