Mega Mentor 8 months on — what have we learnt and what’s next?
By: Kirsty Joan Sinclair
Tags: Prototyping, Design Leadership, Mentoring

A snapshot of Mega Mentor website

In May this year, we launched Mega Mentor, a global mentoring service for those ready to step up into design leadership roles. You can read more about it here. 8 months on, 108 Mega Mentors have joined.

Last July we ran a survey asking our mentors about their experience using Mega Mentor. In this post we share the top 5 things we’ve learnt and what’s coming up next.

What we did

We wanted to understand our mentor’s experience joining Mega Mentor and how their mentoring sessions went. We contacted our mentors asking them to fill in a survey. We got 16 responses — Mega Mentors are busy people!

What we found out

1. The majority of the mentees were starting their design careers|

10 out of 16 mentors said that the majority of their mentees were just starting their design careers. This confirmed an assumption that we picked up ourselves from sessions with mentees.

It showed that while there are early career mentoring programmes for designers out there, there is still a demand for the one-off, easy to access mentoring that attracted them to Mega Mentor.

2. Some of the challenges that our mentors faced were around job requests

One of our key goals with Mega Mentor was to remove the awkwardness for people in reaching out to mentors for help, but it appears some of our mentors felt awkward around requests for jobs from their mentees.

This highlights the need for guidance on good practices for both mentors and mentees to help them understand how to get the most from Mega Mentor.

3. Our mentors are open to learning more about mentoring

13 out of 16 mentors are confident about mentoring, but were open to learning more, while 3 out of 16 said “I’m familiar with mentoring but could do with some guidance.”

This supports the need for guidance around mentoring to help them frame their sessions.

4. Some of our mentors want to edit their profiles

The main reason Mega Mentors contact us is to edit their profiles, so it came no surprise when our survey told us that at least 3 of our mentors wanted to be able to edit their profiles.

This tells us that our current setup of Mega Mentor isn’t helping them to edit their profiles easily and that they want more control over what they show on their profile over time.

5. Time is a challenge for our mentors

At least 6 of our mentors from the survey mentioned time being a challenge ranging from “Finding time for the mentees and constrain it into a defined slot” to “I think my most important challenge so far has been reorganising meetings (calendly does not offer the flexibility I need to avoid reworking agendas)”

What this shows is that we need to be able to offer more flexibility for our mentors to be able to rearrange their calendar easily according to their schedule.

What’s next?

Earlier on we decided that once we had 100 mentors signed up on Mega Mentor, we would review and consider building a robust platform to enable a better experience for Mega Mentors and mentees.

Right now there are two directions we want to explore: improving the platform that enables Mega Mentor and providing more support for the community around it.

So what are we looking into for the next steps?

We are looking to curate guidance around mentoring to help mentors and mentees structure their sessions

We are exploring partnerships to provide a Mega Mentor as a mentorship platform

We are working on a product roadmap to improve Mega Mentor to include things like allowing mentors to edit their profiles and providing support for a smoother scheduling experience

We are considering what data is worth collecting, so we can measure the success rate of people’s planned sessions.

Help us make these changes…

Our team is a group of volunteers who give up their time for free to work on Mega Mentor. We’re looking for another volunteer who is an interaction designer to join us and redesign the user experience for Mega Mentor.

Are you:

passionate about mentoring within and changing the design industry?

Looking for a side gig?

Someone able to design a new user experience for Mega Mentor?

Ok with volunteering for free like us (the rest of the team at Mega Mentor)?

If you’re interested in volunteering your time and join our team, get in touch by sending us an email to team@mega-mentor.com and if you have them, send over some samples of your work. We’d love to hear from you!

The (current) team at Mega Mentor,

Afsa, Ale, Mat and Kirsty