Inaspect Our Engineering Mentorship Program and How It Helps Our Engineers Develop

Our engineering team is the largest team at Buffer. It has many moving parts and is made up of several smaller teams. As with any large team, we want to make sure that no individual is short of guidance or the opportunity to grow. In this post, I’m going to share a little more about how we achieved this through a new program at Buffer that we’ve had great success with, our Engineering Mentorship Program.

Why a mentoring program?

Over the years in our engineering team we have achieved great results by combining and sharing knowledge from engineers. We have also seen spontaneous mentoring relationships and are currently at a point where we have several senior engineers who, of course, take on the role of mentoring a younger team member.

These relationships proved hugely beneficial to both junior and senior engineering growth, and helped teams become more cohesive and move faster. In order to expand the mentoring opportunities to more engineers, we decided to start an official mentoring program on the engineering team to strengthen existing relationships and build new relationships between engineers who are interested in growing as mentors or from one to learn.

One of our main focuses on the Engineering Management Team is helping engineers grow and advance within our career framework. At the same time, they learn best practices and apply them to improve the quality of our code base over time.

In the past, our engineers have heard some confusion about how investing in code quality and best practices relates to our career framework, and concerns that some technical debt could make it harder for newer engineers to move forward. This mentoring program feels like it has helped improve more junior engineers, something we are always eager to do more of.

How we built our mentoring program

There are three roles in our Engineering Mentorship Program: mentors, mentees and mentorship champions.

Mentors

Mentors are senior engineers who have extensive experience to develop the skills of others. They meet regularly with their mentees and offer the mentee a safe space to think out loud and be a sounding board for new ideas and innovative thinking.

Mentors can also be the personal cheer squad for a mentee, motivate mentees to achieve their goals and inspire mentees with the mentor’s own achievements.

Mentors will share best practices, code quality, testing, refactoring and how they relate to our engineering career framework. Promoting a mentees is a sign of success! A mentor’s goal is to technically advance mentees, and promotions are one (but of course not the only) way that growth can be seen.

Mentors help identify and resolve problems, provide practical, timely advice and a pairing program to remove blockers and share knowledge.

Mentees

Mentees are engineers who feel they could benefit from having a mentor to guide their careers and skills growth. You don’t necessarily have to be “younger”. A senior back-end engineer who wants to learn front-end could also be a mentee.

This program is aimed at mentees, so they own the relationship and are responsible for organizing and conducting all meetings with their mentor. You shouldn’t wait for your mentor to drive that growth. In their discussions, they should prepare tasks that they need help with and code examples.

Mentees are responsible for implementing their mentor’s feedback and growing from it. It is up to the mentee to take the advice and walk with it.

Mentorship champions

We have already tried mentoring, but we were missing something: the support of our mentors. To remedy this, we developed the idea of ​​Mentorship Champions. These are team members who are excellent mentors themselves, have extensive experience training mentoring engineers, and are very experienced engineers.

Mentorship champions meet with mentors regularly to provide guidance and support on how to become a great mentor. They help with any blockages, challenges, or frustrations that mentors may have and provide feedback on the program to the mentorship manager to ensure it is successful.

The difference between a mentor and a manager

Although there are some similarities in mentoring and management relationships, such as: B. the support and guidance of team members to achieve certain goals, there are also significant differences.

A manager’s focus is generally on achieving organizational and team goals, as well as ensuring that his advice and decisions are aligned with the company’s vision. With a mentor, the focus shifts to personal and professional growth. The agenda of a mentor-mentee relationship focuses on sharing knowledge and experience.

A manager is responsible for reviewing an employee’s contributions and providing performance feedback, while mentor feedback and ratings are personal communication aimed at helping a mentee focus on their long-term goals.

Open and honest communication is a key element in a mentor-mentee relationship. The whole point of the relationship is to speak openly about the deficits of the mentees and to overcome them with the help of an experienced mentor.

In summary:
✅ Mentors Give answers; Manager ask questions
✅ Mentors stand up for you; Manager develop you
✅ Mentorship is casual; administration is formal
✅ Mentorship is personal; administration is organizational

To help our mentors and mentees with orientation, we have defined some key principles of this program:

A mentoring session is all about the mentee.

It is the mentor’s time, so the mentor should focus the session on them, their questions, and their needs. The mentor should also be willing to fill in the gaps that the mentee does not bring with them or is difficult for themselves to see.

Mentors help their mentees grow technically by supporting their mentees’ identity and interests.

The aim of the program is not to have a single approach. It provides the tools and support for mentors so that everyone can thrive in their own way.

Not everyone needs a mentor.

Some people learn best on their own or from casual chats with many different people, or they get everything they need right now from their manager and don’t need additional mentoring.

An engineer doesn’t have to be a mentor to grow.

There are other opportunities for engineers to develop their careers, and our mentoring program is not a prerequisite in our career framework.

Feedback from the mentoring program

Initially, we ran this program as a six-month experiment. After the first 6 months, we asked participants for feedback on the program and whether they wanted to continue it.

The feedback we received from the program has been extremely positive, showing that these types of relationships and the support the program provides has been very useful for both mentees and mentors to grow.

Here are a few highlights:

• […] I think that mentorship has been the biggest factor in my growth at Buffer
• […] the mentorship syncs are definitely one of the most helpful syncs that I have
• […] Overall it’s a very positive experience, I really enjoy building a trusting relationship with my mentees and seeing them progress, it is certainly a rewarding experience. It is also a good opportunity for me to deal more intensively with various product areas and problems outside of my busy day-to-day work
• This program has been an incredible help to me, enjoying every single one of my calls […], my mentor is always challenging me and he has helped me grow by doing the things I love.
• […] “It was just a joy full of learning and mutual trust. I felt like we could connect and discuss a lot of things about career frameworks, personal development and technical decisions in our organization. “

Based on the feedback and the individual chats with engineers, we have decided to continue the mentoring program indefinitely with some changes.

What we have changed in the program

Add more mentorship champions

One of the identified advantages of the mentorship program was the dedicated support of our mentors through mentorship champions. This role has so far only been carried out by our staff engineer, Mike San Romanmaking it difficult to scale and add more mentor pairs (support more mentors). For this reason, we decided to add more senior engineers and experienced mentors as Mentorship Champions.

Introduction of regular mentoring chats

Important topics emerged from this experiment, e.g. B. ensuring that the program is inclusive and diverse, supporting and developing female mentors, and making the program more transparent and collaborative with technical managers.

For this reason, we now conduct calls between mentorship champions once a month to discuss the above points, discuss recurring topics in mentoring, and share insights and updates with the engineering management team and a broader engineering team.

Introduction of asynchronous office hours

It was quite difficult to get mentors and mentor champions together in one call because so many of our teams are in different time zones. With the 4 day week and tend to be more asynchronous communication, we decided to introduce asynchronous office hours, where on a certain day everyone shares their updates asynchronously in our private Slack channel. The updates include all of the achievements, challenges, blockers, and celebrations that have occurred in the past few weeks.

So far we have had great results with the mentoring program for the engineering team and we look forward to continuing to invest in it and support our engineers on their career path.