My own service design mentor

One piece of career advice I keep hearing (for instance in Whitney Hess’s interview on the UX Intern Podcast) is to get a mentor.

Why Get a Mentor?

The value of that is obvious: A smart, experienced person who you meet with regularly and learn the craft from? Sign me up!

Oh wait.

The Hard Part

There’s no actual sign-up sheet? You mean I have to actually go find someone and convince them to spend hours of their free time with me, chatting and teaching me about their career?

That’s the hard part.

It’s a really BIG ask.

So I’d been procrastinating on this for ages.

My Mentor

But then in late-2016 I met Mark Plant. He works at my company, ION, but in a different department. Whereas my team works on a specific product, Mark’s team is more of an internal design agency, working on developing various products, both internally and externally.

Basically, he’s doing my dream job 🙂

Testing the Waters

So I bought him a coffee and peppered him with questions about his career and the field of UX. It also came up that he’s into skiing and mountain biking, much like myself, so I asked him a lot about that as well.

Somehow the barrage of questions didn’t scare him off, so I offered to go for another coffee a week or two later. And by then he was already going through a step-by-step explanation of not just UX, but the wider fields of Service Design, Experience Design, and more. It was like he had a curriculum developed and was just waiting for some young designer like myself to ask him to teach them.

It’s Official!

And before I could even ask him to be my mentor, he offered!

We now meet every week or two to design a new app based on the Explor app from the AngelHack hackathon I did last year.

 

Some sketchy sketches of possible app interactions

 

He’s given me career advice, he’s shown me specific techniques, and he’s broadened my horizons beyond just pure UX.

For instance, I previously rolled my eyes at marketing. I sort of felt like it was UX but without the cool tech and research aspects. Mark suggested I read On Brand by Wally Olins, and boom. I am now filled with respect for the discipline of marketing.

Thanks Mark!

Giving Back

By the way, I won’t be as slick of a teacher as Mark, but if anyone reading this is just starting out in tech or UX and have a few questions or even just want someone to bounce design ideas off of, let me know! I’d love to have a mentee of my own.

It’s the circle of life!

Save