Module 3 - Why Mentors Matter
Module 3 focuses on the team effort required to design you. We’ll explore the value of your relationships and from this, you’ll form your design team of experts who will support and guide you through the Designing YOU journey. Click on each section below to jump down the page. What will be covered:
Complete the downloadable activity sheet available and use this as your journal throughout the Designing You modules.
Value in this Module:
Explore why your relationships are essential to helping design you.
Complete activities to help you identify mentor candidates.
Why Designing You Is A Team Effort
As a product designer you don’t need to know it all, but you do need to take insight from a well-assembled team of experts. For example, there’s likely a product designer somewhere responsible for designing the next generation of taximeters to better track and record the cost of a cab ride. The obvious members of their design team are owners of taxi companies, taxi drivers and experts in the design of the previous taximeters. There is no doubt that this team could design a much better meter than the last one. But what if their team also consists of an Uber driver, an Uber user, and a smartphone specialist? Do you think they’d design a different product? Who you surround yourself with influences what (and whom) you design.
As they say, it’s not what you know, it’s who you know. Over the course of your lifetime, you’ll cross paths with thousands of different people, but you’ll rarely recognize the potential value of each of these relationships. We all spend 15 to 20 years in a classroom focused on developing our knowledge and spend relatively little time explicitly developing personal and professional relationships. A rule — yes, a rule — of Designing YOU is that you won’t succeed in achieving your goals alone. It’s a team effort, so you’ll need to really think about who you need on the design team.
ACTIVITY 3.1
Relationship Audit
We want you to map who you know and what they know. This exercise will help you recognize the value of your relationships and the best step in forming your design team.
Recreate the following table in your journal and fill it in with the results of your work. Start by brainstorming people you know. For example, it could be your mom, dad, friend, professor, and boss. Start with your inner circle of close family and friends, then consider “what do they know?” and “what is their area of expertise?” It may be professional (e.g., Sandy is a zoologist) or it may be a hobby or passion (e.g., Ying likes to fix old cars).
Next, think about who they may know. It doesn’t have to be someone specific, rather it can be a role. For example, Sandy is a zoologist so she must know other zoologists, zookeepers, and the management at the zoo where she works. She’s also traveled lots in her job, so she must know other people who have traveled. Similarly, Ying likes to fix old cars so he must know people to buy old cars from, other mechanics, and people like him who love old cars.
Optionally, instead of using the table, you may want to map your network by using a big piece of paper or an online tool; put yourself in the middle and map out as many of your relationships as you can.
Either way, this exercise isn’t about being precise; it’s about recognizing the potential untapped value and depth of your existing relationships. Once you have completed your map or table, you will use this information to start forming your design team.
Forming Your Design Team
The success of mentoring in school is hit and miss. Some universities and colleges assign mentors to all first-year students. These normally start and finish with the first cup of coffee. But mentoring is an essential part of designing you. However, mentoring needs to be a team effort – we call this your design team.
Your design team is a group of trusted advisors who are in it for the long term. Everyone on your design team has a defined purpose based on what they know—their expertise. When designing a product, an engineer is on a design team for a very specific purpose, as is the team member from sales and the member from manufacturing. All these people understand their role and focus their expertise in that area. You need to build your design team with this same intentional mindset. Your team’s advice and expertise will help you explore and get beyond the obvious. This may include advice on everything from school to part-time jobs to volunteer opportunities and what clubs to join. To do this, we recommend you assign your advisors to one of four categories, with each of them playing defined roles. They include the Whole YOU Mentor, the Professional YOU Mentor, the Personal Advisor, and the Real-World Experts.
Click on the button below to explore the definitions of these roles.
Selecting Your Design Team
Now that we’ve established everyone’s roles, the next question is who do you want on your design team?
Replicate the following table in your journal to narrow down candidates for your design team, referring to the network you mapped out in an earlier exercise. It doesn’t matter if you know them directly at this stage. The key is building and refining this preliminary list of candidates. The Whole YOU Mentor and Personal Advisor will likely be from your existing networks. Some of the other candidates will emerge as you progress through the rest of the guide.
