Helping designers lead

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TLDR

  • Role — Co-founder, Service Designer, Ops
  • Date — May 2021
  • Brief — Design an experience that makes it easier for senior designers to get mentoring from design leaders in the industry
  • Outcome —
    • Launched a new mentoring platform with 100+ design leaders signed up to be a mentors
    • Helped mentees to step into leaderships role, leading them to join Mega Mentor as a mentor
    • Met demands for one-off easy to access mentoring

Challenge

There’s lots of opportunities for people early in their career to get mentoring but there was a gap in the industry for experienced designers who were looking to step up and lead. The challenge was to create an experience that allowed senior and experienced designers to find design leaders and get one-off, easy to access mentorship without feeling awkward.

What we did

Mentoring as a service live prototype
Mentoring as a service live prototype

We launched a live prototype to test a hypothesis that experienced designers were looking for one-off mentoring from design leaders about stepping into a leadership.

Following the launch, we carried out user research interviews and codesign workshops to understand mentor’s experiences with the platform and co-created what the future of Mega Mentor could look like.

We learnt:

  • Senior designers used the platform to get mentorship from design leaders about stepping into leadership roles
  • The majority of the mentees were starting their design careers
  • Some of the challenges that our mentors faced were around job requests
  • Our mentors are open to learning more about mentoring
  • Some of our mentors want to edit their profiles
  • Time is a challenge for our mentors
  • Snapshot exploring the future of Mega Mentor
    Snapshot exploring the future of Mega Mentor

There were plans to iterate and develop Mega Mentor in to a robust platform and build a community around it but unfortunately this was paused due to our team’s personal commitments.

Outcomes

  • Over 100+ mentor now signed up to mentor designers
  • Met demands for one-off, easy to access mentoring
  • Some mentees who got mega mentoring stepped into design leadership roles were now signing up to give back and mentor others to step into leadership roles

What they said

“This week's highlight has been the best mentoring chats ever through @Mega_Mentor! Thank you for creating this platform for lost recent grads like me.” [Mega Mentor Mentee]

Further Reading

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