Finding a PM Mentor

Essay originally published on the Product Teacher blog on February 15, 2021.

Because product management is a profession that requires mastering a wide variety of skills, I’ve found that having a mentor significantly accelerates your product management career.

But, many PMs don’t know where to start when it comes to finding a product management mentor. So, let’s start from the beginning.

First, I’ll discuss the benefits of having a mentor. Then, I’ll break down how to decide on the kind of PM mentor you need.

Afterwards, I’ll provide you with some potential ways to find mentors, as well as a guide for how to make the ask. To wrap up, I’ll walk through how to structure your mentor relationship for the most productive outcomes.

The Benefits of Having a PM Mentor

Mentorship accelerates your product management career in multiple ways.

First, having a mentor means you get another perspective on difficult situations at work, whether it’s a tight deadline, lack of resources, or some other challenge at hand. Many times, when we’re deep in the thick of it, it can be hard to take a broader perspective.

Having a mentor gives us the ability to take a step back and reconsider our approach. They serve as a sounding board for us to take a fresh look at the problem, and they can help us break out of unproductive mindsets.

Second, mentors are typically further along in their careers, so they can help you see around corners when it comes to tackling problems.

In other words, they’ve had more experience on the job as product managers. So, they’ve either run into the same problems that you’re currently experiencing, or they’ve developed an intuition about the kinds of challenges you’ll face ahead.

By being able to see around corners, you can plan for unpredictable scenarios, and you can be better prepared for success even under a variety of circumstances.

And, because they’re more advanced in their careers, product management mentors also have more insight about future growth paths, whether that path is the IC PM path, the manager of PMs path, or some other path. They’ll know what it is that employers are looking for, and they’ll have a clearer understanding of what’s expected for each role.

Mentors are also great for you to keep yourself accountable for your own professional growth. While your manager at work will typically keep you accountable for day-to-day execution and deliverables, your manager has less bandwidth to focus on your long-term growth trajectory.

On the other hand, a mentor is solely focused on your long-term growth. So, mentors can keep you accountable for doing the hard work that’s needed to grow, whether it’s self-reflection or stretching into new challenges.

And finally, mentors are great at connecting their mentees to other people and resources. Given their tenure and their experience, they’ll know which people are most valuable to speak with, and which resources will yield the most value on the job for a product manager.

So, now we know what kinds of value a mentor can provide to any product manager. Let’s dive into how to determine the kind of mentor you need.

Deciding on the Kind of Mentor You Need

One of the biggest mistakes people make when looking for mentors is that they keep the entire approach too open-ended. That is, many people don’t want to narrow down their options, and they’re open to being mentored by just about anyone.

I understand this tendency. When you keep it open-ended, you’re hoping to get two things:

But, the problem with this lack of focus is that it makes it very difficult to decide which potential mentors to approach. That then causes many people to become paralyzed with indecision, because the criteria for “who might be a good mentor” is too unclear.

On top of that, even once you do find a potential mentor, you may not know what to ask them, because you haven’t yet clarified what it is that you specifically need.

Therefore, before we even start to look for mentors, we need to focus on a specific development need. That way, we can find potential mentors more easily, and we can increase the likelihood that they’ll agree to help us.

What kinds of specific development needs should we get help with?

The following two kinds of asks are tangible and actionable:

1. A specific skill you want to learn, or
2. A specific kind of situation you want to perform better in

As an example, a specific skill to learn might be “how to get executive buy-in,” or “how to negotiate with customers,” or “how to be more concise with product strategy documents.”

And, a specific kind of situation might be “dealing with sunsetting a product,” or “mediating conflict between two teams,” or “having to make decisions on-the-fly in meetings.”

In other words, don’t look for mentors who will “help you be a better product manager”, because that’s too broad. By focusing specifically on skills or situations, you’ll be able to identify who’s likely going to be able to help you grow as a product manager.

So, now we know what skills and situations we would like help with. How do we look for people who can help us?

Seeking Potential Mentors

Here are some ways to find potential mentors:

At PM events, speakers are typically looking to share their knowledge with others, regardless of whether it’s an online event or an in-person event. This includes individual speakers (e.g. lectures and fireside chats) as well as panelists.

As you’ll hear the most from the speaker, you can use the speaker event to determine whether the speaker’s previous skills and experiences may be helpful to you.

Outside of speaker events, you can always ask friends and family to see whether there’s someone in your network who can help you with the specific growth area that you’re targeting. You never know who your loved ones already know!

At work, consider reaching out to a colleague. Colleagues have their own professional networks, and many times your colleagues are more than happy to support your career growth.

School alumni and workplace alumni (i.e. people who used to work for your current or past employers) are also a great way to find mentors. Because you’re already connected to one another through a common school or workplace, alumni are typically quite happy to volunteer as mentors, or to look through their networks for a potential mentor who can help.

Another great way to find a mentor is to use a dedicated mentorship platform. For example, check out Plato, SCORE, MicroMentor, and ADPList.

Mentorship platforms are specifically focused on helping mentees find mentors. So, by using these platforms, you can quickly find a set of potential mentors.

If you find mentorship platforms to be too intense, there are also lots of peer connection platforms like Fractal, Intros.ai, Lunchclub, Cafecito, and MysteryCoffee.

These connection platforms are great for getting to know peers who aren’t currently a part of your personal network. Many times, a casual hangout can turn into a more dedicated mentor relationship!

Now we know how to find people who might be a good fit for us as mentors. But, mentorship is a two-way street. The other person must agree to work with you, which means you’ll need to ask them to serve as your mentor. How do you make this ask?

Making the Ask

I’ve noticed that many times, requestors make a “cold ask” without getting to know their potential mentor first. They haven’t established a positive relationship yet, and that creates a lot of pressure for the other person.

Let’s put the shoe on the other foot for a moment. Imagine if a stranger came up to you and said the following:

“I need you to be my professional mentor, I want us to meet every week so that I can get promoted and then eventually start my own company.”

You would be freaked out a little by that, right?

Don’t force the other person to commit to an all-or-none situation. Ease into it. There’s no rush to lock someone in as a mentor immediately!

Instead, first get to know your potential mentor in a more casual manner, such as grabbing coffee together. The goal of meeting one another without formalizing a mentor relationship is to test the waters and see if there’s a potential fit.

If you find that the two of you click, and that you’ve learned something valuable from them, that’s when you can ask whether they’d be interested in mentoring you.

Your request doesn’t need to be anything particularly elaborate. It can just be a couple of sentences, like this:

“I’ve really enjoyed chatting with you, and I feel that I could learn a lot from your experiences. I’m looking for a mentor to help me with <focus area> and I think you’d be a great fit. What are your thoughts?”

Don’t be shy about asking! The worst that could happen is that they turn you down, and that’s the same as if you never asked in the first place.

If they say no, stay polite and try to empathize with them. Mentors are busy with their own obligations, and being turned down isn’t something to take personally.

But, if they do say yes, we should then take the lead in structuring what our relationship together might look like.

Structuring Your Mentor Relationship

We need to decide how exactly our mentors are going to help us. There are too many possible things that product managers could use help with, whether it’s moving into different industries, navigating politics, dealing with work life balance, upskilling, or something else.

Mentors are human beings with their own needs and time pressures too, so they can’t give you every moment of spare time. That’s why you need to propose a structure for mentorship, so that they understand what they’re committing to.

The key things you need to flesh out are:

1. Frequency: How frequently will you reach out to them?
2. Method: How will you be working together? In person, remote, or async?
3. Your work: What homework are you committing to?
4. Their work: What homework are they committing to?

Each mentee-mentor pair will have its own dynamics, but a generally good starting point is something like this:

• Frequency: “I’ll schedule time for us every month”
• Method: “To chat over the phone”
• Your work: “A week before we meet, I’ll pull together an agenda and send it over email”
• Their work: “I’d love if you could review the agenda a few days before we meet”

Make it clear to your mentor that you’ll be putting in the majority of the work. The last thing a mentor needs is to take on undefined responsibilities, especially since product managers are already tasked with filling in the white space on the job.

That’s why it’s crucial for us as mentees to define the responsibilities and take on as much of the work as we can.

That said, when it comes to mentorship structure, we should stay open to feedback and changes! Most mentors have mentored at least one other person in the past. So, if they have thoughts on how to make it work better, hear them out and give their suggestions a try.

Still, as a mentee, you have to stay proactive, and you can’t just assume that your mentor will define the relationship for you. Remember that your mentor has the option of working with any mentee they’d like. So, make it easy for them to work with you!

Closing Thoughts

Mentorship is rewarding for both mentors and mentees, especially in the fast-moving discipline of product management. But, as mentees, we need to invest elbow grease to set up a fruitful mentor relationship.

The first thing we should do is define what we want to learn from a potential mentor. Then, we need to find people who might be able to teach us what we’re specifically focused on.

Afterwards, we should casually meet with them to gauge whether there’s mutual interest in a mentor relationship. If so, we can then propose a structure to our mentor, and we can iterate from there.

With mentorship, you’ll accelerate your product management career!

Originally published at https://www.productteacher.com on February 15, 2021.