In 2020, my company had a collaboration with CapitalG / Google so that some employee volunteers could attend mentoring sessions with an experienced mentor at Google to exchange career goals and tips. I took the opportunity to join and participate.

Structure and goals

The mentoring sessions were organized as follows:

• comprised of one experienced mentor working for Google
• three to four mentees from companies that have partnerships with CapitalG / Google that are also looking for growth
• meetings about once a month, with a few goals to achieve each time to try to “grow” during that period

I did not really know what to expect from these sessions, as I do not have a career plan and prefer to follow the “flow”. Still, it seemed like an interesting experience from which I could grow.

Sessions

The mentorship program highlighted the following points to think about and discuss (copied from an email):

Goals:

• Get to know each other - your backgrounds, motivations, skills, interests, and goals.
• Create a shared understanding - establish confidentiality, ground rules, discuss goals and expectations.
• Facilitate learning - establish a learning environment, ask open-ended questions, and identify tangible action items to take.

Some things to discuss:

• Your career background, interests, and motivations.
• What ground rules / guidelines do we want to follow?
• What is the topic or topics to discuss today?
• What do you want? What is happening now? What could you do?
• What will you do?

First session - 2020-04-14

Program

We received the following email before the the first session:

A successful mentor-mentee relationship is driven by the mentee(s). Mentees, please think through:

• What do you hope to learn from this mentor / mentee experience? What does success look like?
• If you have had past mentor / mentee relationships, what made those relationships helpful? Not helpful? -What do you need from your mentor and your peers to feel safe and to openly discuss your goals, your challenges, and to be receptive to advice and feedback?

Meeting Structure

• Start with introductions & check-ins. What do folks want to learn from this experience?
• Talk about what a successful mentor / mentee relationship looks like.
• Establish ground rules, including guidelines for confidentiality and balanced participation.
• Identify topics to discuss and agree HOW you will discuss them.
• Depending on time, start talking about a topic that the group wants to discuss.

The meeting

The first session was an introductory call with the mentor from Google and two other people from other companies partnered with CapitalG. We had to set:

• what we would like to do
• how we would try to achieve it
• what we had already done

The goals of the other mentees were:

• Mentee 1: improve code quality and testing in his team
• Mentee 2: grow into a new role of manager. Is he ready for it, and what can he do to achieve it

For my part, the question was: “How could I make the biggest impact to help people in a few months?”.

Goals for next session

Following the rules, I asked myself question and how try to resolve them:

• how can I better estimate or find the pain points that are slowing down the team or the product and are worth addressing?
  • improve a small part of a system I find annoying or slow and ask for feedback
  • better understand some problems from another angle, the end-user perspective, by checking support tickets
• how can I enable team synergy to recognize these pain points and be willing to schedule changes with respect to the product roadmap?
  • collect a list of past items that the company had already opened (not linked to the product roadmap) and talk to people to get their opinion on each topic

Second session - 2020-05-12

The second session started with a summary of what we had done the previous month, followed by updates. Mentees and the mentor could ask questions at any time.

• Mentee 1: he had found a new way to write unit tests and was trying to encourage its adoption by his team
• Mentee 2: a new role had opened up at his company, and he had his eye on it

At that time, I had been with my company for only a few months, and I had achieved the following:

• I tried to change something in the build system and broke it, but this ultimately led to other positive changes as we could refactor a few old things
• I handled some support tickets and reviewed responses from the support team, becoming more knowledgeable about the support process and the software. However, I was unsure what to do with that information
• unfortunately, I did not have the time to talk to many people about their perspectives on technical debt or other pain points

I did not take a lot notes on what we discussed, so the summary is quite short.

Goals for next session

At the end of the session, the mentor asked us to prepare for the next session (also copied from his email):

• For everyone to ask one or two questions of each of the other two group members that might help them think about what to do next - e.g., which area to understand better or what small new thing to try next that could be a small step towards the person’s overall multi-month goal, or yield new information/ideas towards it.
• Then, for everyone to commit to one thing they will do between now and our next group session and let the group know on this thread.

I will start with a single question for each mentee to get the ball rolling:

• Mentee 1: You just had an epiphany about how to best write great unit tests. How can you help create a different kind of aha moment for one of your team members - e.g. on how writing tests might help them with their goals?
• Mentee 2: Imagine you got that role tomorrow. How would you really feel about that? Would it satisfy your personal development goals, feel like a trophy, confusing, scary, satisfying, something else?
• Jean-François - You just “moved fast and broke things” :-) What was the reaction of your teammates and managers and how might it have been different from what you would have expected?

Third session - 2020-06-09

Each mentee had other goals or had “discovered” new things since the previous session:

• Mentee 1: he wanted to convince his team and teammates to do things in a certain way to be cleaner and faster. He also wanted to improve his developer experience
• Mentee 2: working in the QA department of a large company, he wanted to be able to refactor parts of the codebase to improve tests and be more agile. As it was getting slower and slower to add test at the end of development and ensure the quality of the software

On my side:

• feedback from my teammates: I felt that they were unwilling to break things themselves, or did so very rarely. We had a technical debt that kept growing. We needed to clean up a few unused features and assumptions, but the software also had technical restrictions due to integration with many third parties. Therefore, striking a good balance was very hard
• I was also in the process of redoing the build. This was a very political process, someone had left the company while trying to do it. So I took it upon myself to redo it, but it was set as a low priority
• on support tickets: the support team worked closely with the development team, so it gave us direct visibility into the issues our customers were facing. The development team also had an “on-call” rotation for a few days each month during office hours, but it was an unpopular task that most developers were reluctant to perform

Fourth session - 2020-07-14

I was alone with the mentor.
There was clearly a lack of motivation or dedication from the other mentees, and it seemed there was no longer a clear track to follow.

So I had the opportunity to discuss with the mentor for almost an hour about:

• quick wins: how to have the biggest impact with the smallest effort
• how to get help from people
• the mentor’s experience at Google with respect to outsiders: making other people help you

Fifth session - 2020-08-11

For this last session, the mentor was absent.
So I discussed with the other mentees about their experiences and what they gained from the mentorship program.

• Mentee 1: now has a quick workflow using Vim and the CLI that he likes and is faster than the full build. He remembers my quote from one of our discussions, “you are not always right”, in that he wanted to persuade a teammate to do things his way
• Mentee 2: he wanted to wait until the end of the year to maybe switch company, as a large refactoring had finally been acknowledged to address the technical debt

Conclusion

I must say I was disappointed with the whole mentorship program. The program lost traction quite quickly, and it seemed that nobody was really invested or doing anything anymore. Even if I was the only one to attend all meetings, I also lacked motivation at the end. It can clearly be seen by the lack of notesand actions I took for fourth and fifth sessions.
If I had to summarize what I gained from it, it would be “not a lot”, as I do not think it changed a lot my views or ways of doing things. It may have helped me better formalize and be more confident about how I work outside of my assigned projects.

Still, it was nice discussing with other people and hearing about their experiences.

I think one of my main problems is that I did not expect anything to begin with, and I did not have any clear goals to “grow”, so this is my fault. However, should there be another mentorship program, I would still participate. One hour per month is nothing.

Also I remember vaguely that it was Covid in 2020… that must not have helped the whole situation.