Mentors and mentees usually have many things on their table with work, personal projects, and their training paths. Learning opportunities are infinite, but the time available is not. How can we foster productive mentoring relationships without consuming our time communicating and aligning our expectations? Read on to learn how a mentoring agreement can help you streamline the mentor-mentee relationship, making communications more efficient, and setting the — sometimes hidden — expectations on both sides of the deal. My struggles navigating the mentorship program At Eventbrite, we run an engineer. During six months, developers and leaders both mentor and receive mentorship from their peers. A committee matches participants depending on the skills they want to learn or teach. The program has happened a couple of times already, and I have always had hardworking mentees and great mentors. However, during the initial cycle, I struggled with several aspects of the relationship. The first issue was accountability and commitment: How could I motivate my mentees to get things done and make the most of our time? Also, how could I do it without coming off as pushy or too demanding? Other challenges I faced were inefficient communications or lack of clarity in the goals and expectations. As a mentee myself, I assumed my mentors might be experiencing similar challenges. With these issues in mind and craving to improve, I did some research looking for solutions. The mentoring kickoff meeting The mentoring kickoff meeting is a quick gathering where mentor and mentee set goals and talk about how they will measure their achievement. However, the most critical part of the kickoff meeting is to read, understand and clarify the points of the mentoring agreement. What is a mentoring agreement? A mentoring agreement is a reference document where mentor and mentee agree what are their commitments during the period they work together. The agreement highlights what mentor and mentee are going to do, establishing a two-way relationship. It also makes accountability an official part of the mentorship experience and helps identify areas where either mentor or mentee need extra support. The agreement specifies how communication happens between the two participants, establishing the channels you are going to use and striving for openness and transparency in the communication. Discussing what the mentee will do and by what date is essential to make the mentoring experience productive. You need to know what success looks like to achieve it. I like to keep the mentoring agreement short, with five to eight bullet points per role. Some points are intentionally vague, leaving room for interpretation and ongoing discussion. Although you could say this is all common sense, there is value in making it explicit. It is more efficient, as you compress several conversations into one. Moreover, you demonstrate the value you bring to the mentorship experience by running it like a pro. In my first try, this agreement has worked well: it reduced communication overhead, and my relationships have been more productive. I will admit that from time to time I have let a deadline slide for fear of affecting the relationship. Would you add anything else to this agreement? Is there something you think is helpful to mention? Drop me some lines below or ping me on Twitter. Photo by Mimi Thian on Unsplash Tagged , Raquel was mindlessly browsing Instagram on her Pixel 3. Her thumb repeating the same gesture over and over again — until she found an image that intrigued her and then tapped the hashtag octoberfest in the comments. Read on to learn how we did it. It all starts with data At Eventbrite, we have two sides to our marketplace-based business: the business organizer side and the consumer attendee side. With 3 million events published in 2017, there is a huge user experience problem with trying to show an increasing amount of events onto your mobile screen — all at the same time. So my team and set out to improve the event discovery experience, which started with our home screen — a simple feed of upcoming events. The event discovery funnel With a need to understand how people physically wanted to explore events the team first needed to understand the consideration process for attending the event. Understanding these three core influences is necessary to power the backend response and put the app in a position to show a high-possible conversion event. While seemingly straightforward, the three influences are relational to each other in that if one of the influences is problematic in regards to attendance , then the others can overcome the adverse effect of it. The event itself is the draw inventory , but the level of commitment needed to travel to Burningman means that I need lots of good friends going to make it happen attributes. We wondered if the transition between the two mobile gestures swiping and tapping was fluid back-and-forth or if it was funnel-based goes one-way and if these gestures correlate with intent to attend an event. Qualitative assessments showed that the Home Feed with its vertical-infinite scroll was highly used with a swiping gesture. As users would find events or canned searches that interested them, they would move to a tapping gesture to dive deeper. Moreover, once a user wanted to find a specific event they would leverage the keyword input for search and begin typing. Interacting with push notifications complemented this discovery experience. Top-level user interactions with push notifications also complemented this discovery experience. This is the least amount of effort a user can provide since it is virtually none and corresponds with zero intent. This browse experience is a simple repetitive action that the user can do even if they are bored and looking for something to do an everyday use case and corresponds with a low level of
