Authors: Sarah Naqvi and Steve Lounsbury Struggling with a concept and frantically trying to find the answers online? Are you thinking: I should just ping a teammate or Is this something I should already know? That’s fine, I’ll ask anyway. And then you do ask and get an answer and are feeling pretty darn proud of yourself and move forward. But wait, now I have about 25 follow-up questions. Sound familiar? Or how about the career growth questions that can be sometimes too uncomfortable asking your lead or manager? Oh, I know, I’ll take them to reddit. But wait, they have no company context. Yeah, also familiar. I know. I should get a mentor! But darn. I’ve heard so many stories… Who do I approach? Will they be interested? What if they reject me? And what if it’s not working out? Shopify is a collaborative place. We traditionally pair with other developers and conduct code reviews to level up. This approach is great for just-in-time feedback and unblocking us on immediate problems. We wanted to continue this trend and also look at how we can support developers in growing themselves through longer term conversations. We surveyed our developers at Shopify and learned that they: Love to learn from others at Shopify Are busy people and find it challenging to make dedicated time for learning Want to grow in their technical and leadership skills. These findings birthed the idea of building a mentorship program targeted at solving these exact problems. Enter Shopify’s Engineering Mentorship Program. Shopify’s RnD Learning Team partnered with developers across the company to design a unique mentorship program and this guide walks readers through the structure, components, value-adds, and lessons we’ve had over the past year. Gathering Participants Once a quarter developers get an email inviting them to join the upcoming cycle of the program and sign up to be a mentee, mentor, or both. In addition to the email that is sent out, updates are posted in
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