Mentorship Advice

I have always tried really hard to learn from others in my career. It really helps me when I have role models to look up to who inspire me. I have found that having mentors is a great way to get advice, feel connected, and grow within your personal and professional life. I’ve been very lucky and privileged to have some really great people that I get to interface with on a regular cadence that have taken a true interest in me and my success. I have found my mentors mainly by asking coworkers and friends if there’s someone they’d recommend I connect with. I’ve learned that folks later in career are actually really excited by the prospect of chatting with those early in career, and, even sometimes, ask if you will reverse mentor them. 

I have a separate folder on my computer that I take notes in during my mentorship sessions with folks. This helps me recall and use the advice they’ve provided me with and allows me to go back to the advice if I need it any point. I wanted to take a moment to list out some of the advice I’v received so far that has helped me.

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It helps a lot to have honest conversation with your manager when you can. It can be really intimidating to ask for critical feedback or feedback on your performance, but it helps you calibrate where you are. I used to ask my manager to provide me with critical feedback during our 1:1s and sometimes I felt like I wasn’t really getting the most actionable feedback. My mentor recommended that I ask in advance and send my manager an agenda specifically stating what I want to ask about and learn more about prior to meeting. My mentor helped me understand that it’s really hard as a manager to remember at the top of your head each individual contributor’s performance on your team and come up with something helpful to share with folks on the spot. Having time in advance to prepare makes it so that your manager can provide you with good advice and feedback. After trying this, I was able to learn more about my performance on the team and what I was doing well and what I could improve. 

Another way to learn more about your manager’s priorities so that you can better meet the needs of the team is to ask your manager what their goals are. I had never thought about asking this because I had always approached meetings with my manager as time that I could learn more about what I was doing right or wrong. However, asking this question really helped me gain insight into why and how my manager prioritizes work and what things he sees as important to foster within our team. Having this information I can now keep in mind what I can do to drive more impact in line with our organization’s missions.

Shifting focus to more of daily work, I had realized that I was in a bit of a rut. I found it challenging, especially with my larger projects, to have a final vision or understand how to best drive forward these features. One of my mentors recommended that I watch a Ted talk on the concept of the “Golden Circle”.

Golden Circle Ted Talk by Simon Sinek.

Without giving spoilers, because this is a great talk, the speaker talks about how you can go about thinking of the everyday work that you’re doing. My mentor shared this video with me and cited it as the way that she thinks about her work. 

Finally, a lot of work that I need to do as a PM involves working with other teams that we refer to as “partner teams”. This can be really challenging when multiple visions, stakeholders, timelines, goals, and products are involved. I’m still trying to figure out how to best work with partners and am not always successful. When it comes to making tough decisions one of my mentors advised to ask yourself— “Is that a hill that you want to die on?”. A lot of times you’ll have to say yes to things that you may not agree with, but it’s important to strategically pick out what you should say no to, and this is usually a gut feeling. I’m working on trusting my gut more and being more confident in my choices, but it’s still really hard as a new PM. The other piece of helpful advice for a partner team was that sometimes you need to let your partner team try and fail so that they can learn on their own. On our team, we’ll have partners come to us asking to build something very large and complex, and sometimes it’s not easy to talk your partner out of their vision even if you think it won’t succeed. In these scenarios, you can offer that they spend development cycles building a smaller, more scoped portion of their feature as a proof of concept to experiment with. This sucks since they are spending resources that otherwise could be used more efficiently, but this is a learning opportunity and then you can help to redirect them. It’s important to let people fail on their own since in the longterm it is beneficial for both teams. 

Overall, I’m still learning a lot and am really grateful for my mentors. I’ve been able to use a lot of the above advice in a way that has improved my relationships and progress at work.