A Shopify interns insight to mentorship
Author: Kelly Ma, Originally published April 7, 2021
I completed my internship at Shopify in the Winter 2021 term. This was my first time working at Shopify and my second time working remotely. Mentorship was crucial to my remote internship experience because it encouraged me to ask questions and to confide in someone at a new company who I had never met in person. I think that good mentorship is crucial when working remotely because it creates a human connection that implicitly offers context at a new workplace.
The word “mentorship” is tossed around frequently and its definition evolves throughout your career. In my case, my mentor and I fostered a partnership that was successful. For me, a successful mentorship is one that generates career success and satisfaction for both mentors and mentees while creating opportunities for growth. For example, my number one goal at the start of my internship was to become a full-time Shopifolk and my mentor sought teaching experience in order to become a Senior Developer. What made our partnership successful?
My mentor and I were honest with each other.
This is not easy at the beginning and we found that by asking each other simple, open-ended questions, we learned to be honest. They told me that I was their first mentee and asked me about my expectations for the mentorship. I shared my intended outcome of becoming a full-time Shopifolk after graduation. By not withholding our intended outcomes, we could communicate openly. We charged our trust batteries with each other by being open and this allowed me to seek feedback more frequently in addition to having someone to confide in or vent to.
My mentor was invested in me.
They set up recurring 1:1s during my 2nd week at Shopify and invited me to join team social events. Later, they also set aside a 15-minute sync every morning so that we could catch up and build our relationship. This was also an opportunity for me to ask questions about the work that I was blocked on. They created a great template for our syncs with 3 questions:
- What is on your mind? This prompted me to share blockers immediately instead of waiting for a weekly sync.
- What is your focus for today? This created alignment between my work and the rest of the team.
- What can I help you with today? Honestly, this was exactly what I needed to hear during difficult projects. Often, my mentor was able to direct me to the best Slack channel or the best person to answer questions.
My mentor provided options instead of answers.
This was impactful for me because it encouraged me to exercise my decision-making muscles. I had the opportunity to dig deeper into my own interests by exploring options, often discovering new interests at the same time! For example, my craft is backend development and it was my first time working with Ruby and Rails. To help me gain context, my mentor and my lead labelled a set of “good first issues” on GitHub. By identifying impactful work from a range of issues, I was provided with challenges instead of clearly-defined work. I used this opportunity to ask questions and learn more about my team’s work. As an immediate side-effect, I interacted with Shopifolk outside of my team and forged new relationships.
They challenged me to be antifragile and to set stretch goals.
Being antifragile isn’t the same thing as being resistant in that antifragile bodies thrive when there is disorder in the environment. I probably fall in between resistant and antifragile on the continuum right now. By setting stretch goals, I held myself accountable for exploring unknowns and taking ownership of new technical challenges. One way they challenged me to be antifragile was by asking me to own a project goal for an entire cycle (6 weeks). As a goal owner, I tackled a range of non-technical challenges within a short period of time, including: aligning stakeholders via ad hoc meetings, updating GitHub issues to convey the state of the goal, and learning how to find the right context at a large company like Shopify.
All in all, my mentor was an invaluable resource in building context and supporting my career growth. The prospect of onboarding to a brand new tech stack and creating impact in only 4 months became less daunting because I knew my mentor was rooting for me. My mentor also helped me balance my intended outcomes with integrating into the team. Often, our daily syncs shed light on topics I didn’t even know that I wanted to learn about!
