How to plot the course for successful mentorship
A dialogue on design between a mentor and a mentee
Mentorship is valuable. Especially in UX where the landscape is broad and the terrain is steep — having a helping hand is key to accelerating your growth. At Shopify, every intern is paired up with an experienced mentor and many interns say it’s a significant factor in their improvement. But what exactly does that mentorship look like? How do you best use your mentor’s time? Or as a mentor, how can you best facilitate success? Through having conversations with my peers and some mentors-to-be, I found that these were the questions that kept popping up, and so, my mentor and I took a stab at answering them!
During my four months as a design intern at Shopify, I leveraged the support system in place to be more deliberate about my growth. As a student with not-so-much experience with established products and design systems, my mentor was a huge part in helping me navigate them. But moving forward doesn’t come without clear communication, expectation setting, and partnership.
Whether you’re reading this because you’re an intern seeking mentorship, or a mentor wanting to better foster success, take a peek at this Q&A between Phil McClelland (a UX manager) and me (a design intern).
Tell us about yourself and what you do.
Phil: I lead a small cross-disciplinary UX team, building products like Shopify Flow to help merchants automate and grow their business.
Queenie: I’m a second-year Systems Design Engineering student at the University of Waterloo, and last fall, a design intern on the Shopify Flow team.
What was a fear or uncertainty you had going into the mentorship experience?
Phil: We work in an environment with a lot of autonomy, but with autonomy comes ambiguity — which can make onboarding very difficult for anyone. For Queenie, I trusted that the tenacity she displayed in her interview would help her thrive. (Turns out: we were right! But I did make the mistake of telling her early on that I thought she’d learn quickly and do well. Don’t intimidate your interns, folks!)
Queenie: I came into the term knowing that I didn’t even know what I didn’t know! I was afraid to let anyone down. Feeling like I needed to put up a facade stopped me from asking the questions I needed to ask or learn the things I needed to learn. But quickly, Phil and I set up 1-on-1s to start sifting through those uncertainties.
Would you say you’re similar to the other person? How does this affect having them as a mentor or mentee?
Phil: We share an education background — her current program was also my undergrad, but in other respects, we’re very different. She’s more bold and enthusiastic against my quiet reserve. The shared background made it easier to speak the same language and draw analogies to common experiences, and the personality mix has actually made my job easier as a mentor — she’ll dive quickly into a task, and I can follow up with feedback from a whole different perspective.
Queenie: Not at all. On our team, we keep a spreadsheet of Enneagram personality types, and for the category of enthusiasm (with the maximum score being 30), I scored a 25, and Phil, a 4. I consider myself to be hyperactive, whereas Phil prefers stability. This synergy gave me more autonomy over how I structured and developed my own design process at work while knowing I could count on a fresh set of eyes from Phil.
How would you define a successful internship? How are those goals set?
Phil: Work-wise, I want to see at least a few good project arcs throughout the internship, with the mentee able to take their work end-to-end with our development team, ship it, and see the impact.
But just as important to me is knowing what our intern wants to achieve in the term. Is there a particular part of their skill set that they want to grow? Is there a new exposure or experience they want to soak up? Internships are a great time to learn, so a student should set and meet their personal and career development goals, not only for their own sake but also for how it feeds back into our professional community.
In terms of goals, I want to lay out the context for a project — the impact we want to have for our users, constraints and pressures, some suggested avenues to explore, and then have the mentee put forward their own plan and goals for how they’ll get there. I’ll check in to give feedback and any process nudges along the way, but otherwise, I want them to pursue their work just as autonomously as our full-time designers do.
Queenie: In my opinion, a successful internship means coming out the other side with a clear idea of what I can improve on moving forward. Though the impact on the product and team is important, as a student, I want to gain quality knowledge as fast as possible. My main goal is to better understand my skill set and how I can expand it to become the type of designer I aspire to be and make the impact I want to make.
During my internship, being able to own and drive projects on my own has first-handedly help me identify my strengths and weaknesses. Knowing that these projects became impactful to our product is the giant cherry on top.
But how to get there? I believe you have to own your goals as a mentee. Mentorship isn’t a video game walkthrough, it is simply the map, and it’s your job to find the treasure. For example, while working on a form UI, I found that UX writing wasn’t my strong suit, whereas I was more comfortable finding stakeholders and dev team members to ask questions and scope out problems. Coming out of that project, I purposely set a goal for myself to learn more about content strategy, and Phil was able to guide me to helpful resources.
Phil, tell us about a time where Queenie wasn’t tackling something the right way, how do you determine the right amount of guidance?
Phil: Around the midpoint in the term, Queenie took on an open-ended UX research project, digging into a line of inquiry she discovered during her earlier design work. I noticed that it was challenging for her to gauge how far to take the investigation — there was always more to learn, but there were also other projects coming up that could use her attention. I encouraged her to set clear and time-bound goals for both herself and the team, making a case for what she’d like to investigate, and then to keep me posted. She did so, and we could both immediately feel the change in pace — I had more confidence in what I could expect and when (and when would be helpful to intervene), and she could be confident moving toward a goal that we were both bought into.
Queenie, tell us about a time where Phil wasn’t exactly providing the best guidance, what happened?
Queenie: I prefer constructive feedback to be blunt — I want to know exactly what I’m doing wrong, whereas Phil started off the term with feedback that was sandwiched with praise. When I felt it didn’t help me grow and be uncomfortable, I let him know immediately. Our 1-on-1s grew to fit both our feedback styles, it felt like our conversations were more productive and I was more comfortable with being wrong — knowing I could always ask for honest commentary. If you notice that you and your mentor’s communication styles don’t necessarily match, bring it up! Asking for help or constructive criticism should never be a negative experience.
How does mentorship end? What does an exit plan look like, and can it be ongoing even after the internship?
Phil: I try to be generous with my time. After all, I’m a beneficiary of mentorship too. However, relationships take time and effort. I recommend mentees ask for what they’re looking for and be specific: are you wanting advice on future job applications, feedback on portfolio work, or just want to check-in occasionally to maintain professional connections? It’s easy to drift apart, and you can avoid that by being clear about intentions, and making a plan together.
Queenie: During my last two days, Phil and I looked at the goals I set for that term and how they fed into my projects and performance. We mapped out a timeline of the semester and pointed out what worked and what didn’t. This equipped me with an understanding of what my next steps could be, what future opportunities I’m looking for, and which areas of product development I could continue to explore. But anything after that depends on being explicit about what you’re looking for — no matter if it’s formal or informal mentorship.
One piece of advice you would give someone who’s going to be in your position?
Phil: Your job is to create conditions for your mentee’s success, but that’s different from making them succeed. Part of the joy of it is seeing your mentee lean into a challenge and develop themselves to get there.
Queenie: Be vulnerable. No matter where you are in your career, nothing should stop you from admitting your weaknesses. After all, you can’t work on them and harness the power of mentorship without honesty and vulnerability.
No matter where you spend your internship experience, a strong support system can be a great benefit for anyone. Shopify is just one of many tech companies that provide an amazing mentorship program for their interns (in design, development, and everything in between!). But informal mentorship can also work in a similar way.
We hope that the main takeaway from this conversation is how to manage your growth as a mentee, and how to provide that space as a mentor. No matter if you’re just reaching out to someone you look up to over Twitter, or you get paired with a senior designer during your internship/new-grad role, setting expectations for the partnership is going to accelerate the development of your craft and confidence; or as a mentor, of your ability to guide and pave the way for success.
**Huge thanks to my mentor Phil for being an amazing supporter during my time at Shopify, and also for providing insightful answers to these itching questions. Also, to the rest of the Flow team, everyone in #f18-design-interns, and the rest of the UXers I met and collaborated with along the way for making my internship full of learnings and fun!
