Why did you decide to become a mentor?
I decided to join Mentorcruise and become a mentor for several reasons: The first is because I believe I can help people grow in their career by sharing my experiences and help individuals with challenges they face at work, especially when it comes to product management.
The second is because I find this type of work very rewarding. When I help colleagues improve and grow in their careers, it is a nice feeling seeing them succeed.
The third is mentoring is a great learning opportunity for me to see how my mentees tackle challenges at work with or without guidance, as well as mentoring is an awesome opportunity for me to grow my network and build professional relationships. Having a strong professional network always helps when I am hiring or looking to be hired.
How did you get your career start?
After studying computer science, I started a mobile development agency with a group of friends from university. My first full time employment after my company was was as a data analyst at a taxi ride hailing company in London.
There I worked closely with the product and marketing departments to analyse how our customers and drivers where behaving, this work included helping measure successes of product experiments, building out internal data platform and other analysis tasks. I had the ambition to move in to product management, so during my time working there I took training courses to lean about the craft of product management, in addition I also built good relationships with the product & design teams to learn more about the role.
I had the opportunity to start my first role in product management at a different company, a London digital products agency. There I was truly in the deep end of product management and have grown in that career path ever since.
How do you usually set up mentorships?
First and foremost I want to get to know a few things from my mentees: how they like to work and learn, why have they come to me for help and what are their goals and ambitions. By understanding the needs and ambitions of an individual mentee, I can structure a mentorship program that works for them. With most people I collaborate with I setup have a bi-weekly or monthly call, as I expect both of us to do some work in between our meetings. In those meetings (video calls) we discuss challenges they are facing & how they can tackle these challenges.
Some of the topics that have commonly come up when working as a mentor include:
- Discussing product discovery techniques to get alignment and user feedback fast
- Assisting in creating a product strategy and roadmap for a mentee’s product
- Explaining how to work with product goals, and business objectives to determine key metrics
- Using data and to build compelling stories for your team and stakeholders
- Structuring customer research and capture customer insights
- Support your product team’s growth to learn from each other and improve work
- Growing in your own product management career, to take a step to the next level
- Getting in to product management
What are you getting out of being a mentor?
As I mentioned before I believe being part of a community like Mentorcruise is a great opportunity grow my professional network and work with people from all over the world.
By having creating a strong network based on collaboration and trust, it can help me when I am growing my product team.
I also find that mentoring is an opportunity for me to reflect and lean together with my mentee. As I find my self looking back at work I have done, and bring key take aways from such work to my 1:1 meetings to help my mentee with their challenges.
And of course working 1:1 with engaged mentees is always very rewarding.