Why mentoring matters — a Q&A with my own mentor, Ben 👨👧
At productboard, one of our core values is a relentless improvement. Our team is packed full of people who strive to be better at what they do — including me.
Sometimes, this requires me to seek expert guidance from within the company. I often have sessions with leaders from different departments where I ask for advice around setting up growth plans. Sometimes, I turn to our VC partners, who have already seen other companies in their portfolios go through the same challenges and are happy to hop on a call or make introductions.
Then there are times when I have to go beyond the company and tap into the vast amount of experience and support available out there. This is why it’s so important to build your network, join other communities, and in particular, to find a great mentor.
The power of mentorship 🔌
I cannot emphasize enough that I would not be where I am today without the impactful people who have supported and advised me. I have also learned countless things through daily conversations with my colleagues, with candidates, and of course, by messing up. Failure can be painful, but it is also the best learning opportunity.
Finding a mentor helps you follow a more rapid learning curve, negotiate better salaries, and build a stronger identity. There are many examples of how mentoring has transformed lives and careers by maximizing the potential of the mentee (and even the mentor!). It is indeed an amazing opportunity for everyone to learn and grow.
Colleagues often come to me with questions about mentorship. Do I need a mentor? How do I find and approach one? How can I make the most of conversations with a mentor? To answer these questions and more, I thought I’d turn to someone who knows the ropes — my very own mentor, Ben O’Mahony.
I consider Ben to be a true mentor. He always takes time to talk and guide me through challenging times, and he does so voluntarily. He is an exceptionally talented and inspiring people leader who openly shares his knowledge, insights, and wisdom with the community. And with his positive energy and sense of humor, our calls are always exciting and fun!
Why did you get into mentoring? Why are you helping me, for example? 🙋🏻♀️
Firstly, I think it’s really interesting. Mentoring gives you a lot of new ideas as well. It’s all about sharing best practices, understanding how other people do things, and seeing how they think about problems. I’ve definitely taken some of the things that you said in our sessions back to Cytora. So I get a huge amount from it.
It’s also very rewarding. You’re not always going to see an immediate response to the help that you can give, but you tend to in the long term. And the more you can help someone, the better. If you put good out there in the world, it tends to come back.
I think that seeking out people to improve yourself and looking to help others are such key indicators of future success. If someone’s unhelpful, the opposite is true. They don’t want to mentor anyone; they never want to be mentored. They’re missing out on a great way of leveling up and learning, which ultimately hinders their ability to succeed.
Do you have a mentor yourself? 👩👦
I’ve always looked for people to learn from. People are the quickest shortcut to learning. They are much better than textbooks at telling you what you need to know. Do I have my own mentor? Yeah, I’ve asked a few people to formally mentor me, but I don’t have an active one at the moment.
I’ve learned loads from other people, though. In my previous company our CTO was from Skyscanner, and I learned absolutely tons from him. We’ve also just hired some really experienced people at Cytora, and it’s great to be like a sponge and absorb everything they’ve learned.
A lot of people have approached me recently asking about my mentoring experience. It seems like they don’t know how to formally approach and ask someone to mentor them. What advice would you give them? 🤓
It’s funny, isn’t it? We work in an industry where we reach out to people that we’ve never spoken to before, with no guarantee of a reward at the end of it. So asking someone to be a mentor shouldn’t be a problem. It might feel weird and awkward, but you’ve just got to do it. You don’t even need to use the word ‘mentor.’
What’s the best way to search for a mentor? 🕵🏿♀️
I think understanding what you want the mentor for is critical. It’s like hiring someone. What do you want to get from the mentorship? What experience or background do you think that person should have? If you expect a mentor to come with a well-rounded syllabus, you’re not looking for a mentor, you’re looking for a training course.
There are all sorts of platforms and communities you can use to find someone. Events are also a good place to look. Then there’s your company as well. I think it’s important to build a strong internal network in the organization. A mentor doesn’t necessarily have to have done exactly what you want to do. They can maybe just help you with a weakness you’ve got.
Going back to the CTO I work with who was at Skyscanner, he was a mentor for me because he gave me all this experience. I quizzed him on how Skyscanner grew — he was there when it was about 20 people, all the way up to maybe 500 engineers. He wasn’t in recruitment, talent, or HR, but he thought deeply about these things because he was a leader of his part of the organization.
So try and find someone who’s doing what you want to do, but don’t disregard being mentored by people in other areas.
Do you remember any specific advice that your CTO gave you? 🙎🏻♂️<> 🧔🏼
I think he just thought really deeply about how to hire, who to hire, and why to hire them. It was almost always based on things like potential and coachability — the soft side of it — once they’d reached a certain technical level, of course.
How should people prepare for their first meeting with a mentor? Is it helpful to have an agenda before or at least some idea of the areas they want to focus on?
Yeah, definitely. The worst thing you can do is turn up and say, “Mentor me.” I think it’s important to get specific about the problems that you’re currently facing, or the challenges you anticipate having in the future.
You’re looking for a mentor to help you progress in your career and solve the problems in front of you. So bring those problems, articulate and structure them as well as you can, and then ask for advice. Once you’ve started that process and have more meetings, maybe the mentor will point out something else that they’ve spotted that’s running through as a common theme.
Also, be mindful of the fact that their time is valuable. Treat it like that and try and get as much out of the meetings as you can.
Have you ever experienced any awkward moments either as a mentee or a mentor? 😳
Awkwardness, definitely. Because, in a lot of ways, I don’t feel like I’m fully equipped to be a mentor. So yeah, sometimes it’s a bit awkward when someone thinks you’re so much better than you are.
Do you think that mentoring is only for experienced people, or can younger, less experienced people also be mentors? 🎅🏻
It doesn’t really matter where you are on your journey, there’s probably someone who’s a bit earlier on in that journey than you. I remember starting in my first job, and someone who had been there three months was able to get me up to speed.
Actually, there’s something to be said about the proximity of the mentoring. If the mentor is way too far ahead on their journey than the mentee, it’s very difficult for them to speak the same language, because you’ve got to go through different layers of learning and understanding and the way you look at things.
What do you wish that mentees (like me) knew before? 👶🏼
Going back to my earlier point, I think a lot of mentorship is thinking that there’s a better solution out there that you don’t know, because you’ve not done it before. And actually, I’ve found that, more often than not, no one’s done it, or when they’ve done it, it went wrong for whatever reason.
COVID is the perfect example. If anyone says that they had a foolproof plan for a pandemic that they followed to the letter, they’re lying. That stuff happens, but no one really knows what the best way forward is. But bouncing ideas off someone like a mentor is really useful though.
I think a lot of people need that external validation — someone to say, “You’re on the right track.” That’s one of the things that I’ve found that I’m looking for from my mentors. And actually, in maybe 80% of the cases, I probably knew that already. But without that validation, I wouldn’t have had the confidence to go with it.
