Fostering Stronger Remote Mentoring Connections at Microsoft

Masters Capstone Project

TL;DR

Skills: Literature Review, Competitive Analysis, In-Depth Interviews, Survey Design, Qualitative Analysis, Usability Testing, Collaboration

Top Lessons Learned

  • This project highlighted the importance of adapting project scope based on new research insights, even if it means including elements previously excluded. Though our initial project scope was limited to improving newly matched mentoring relationships, our final design included assisting match making - for more details read below!
  • This experience provided me with valuable insights into navigating the complexities of new product development and understanding employee experiences within large organizations such as Microsoft.

The Problem

While remote work offers flexibility, building strong mentorship connections can be a challenge. Our team set out to research, design, test, and iterate on a solution for the prompt we were given to us by our sponsors, during the Winter and Spring quarters.

How might we better foster mentoring connections and delivery in a remote environment?

Learning about mentorship

Before narrowing down our project focus, we wanted to gain a high-level understanding of mentorship and answer questions such as:

  • What is mentorship? What is the difference between mentoring and coaching?
  • What makes a good mentoring relationship?
  • How do remote environments effect mentoring relationships?

I created a shortened visual literature review not only due to an extremely short time frame, but so so our designers could more easily access all of the findings (instead of reading a 20 page paper)

Literature Review
The literature review I conducted not only gave us a good foundational overview of mentorship, it helped us to begin to narrow our focus on what potential problem areas we wanted to explore.

Some of the relevant findings included:
  • Good mentoring relationships are facilitated through meaningful dialogue, perceived similarity, adequate mentor training, and having a structure (goals, agendas).
  • There is some element of serendipity in a good mentoring match.
Competitive Analysis

Through our competitive analysis we found that Google and LinkedIn build strong mentorship culture by engaging participation with leadership and mentors/mentees get recognition for their efforts. Additionally, more mentor programs are using AI-powered matching algorithms

Prioritization Matrix Exercise

The literature review I conducted identified numerous potential areas for improvement in the mentoring experience. However, tackling them all within a single project was unrealistic.  

To prioritize effectively, we narrowed down the issues by generating 20 "how might we" questions (e.g., "How might we improve the mentor matching process?"). These questions were placed on a prioritization matrix that measured feasibility and user value (shown here), followed by a round of voting based on our personal interests.

Given the research emphasis on the critical role of initial stages in successful mentoring relationships, we decided to concentrate our efforts on that specific phase

Developing research questions

Following our prioritization exercise, our main research question became: 

How can we facilitate strong personal connection and trust through meaningful dialogue during the beginning stages of a mentoring relationship?

Sub research questions:

  • How are personal connections built in remote mentor/mentee relationships, and what are some specific techniques?
  • How is trust built in remote mentor/mentee relationships, and what are some specific techniques?
  • How can we facilitate a stronger mentorship culture at Microsoft?

What does mentorship look like at Microsoft?

In-Depth Interviews
To gain a holistic understanding of mentoring relationships, I conducted in-depth interviews with five mentors, and my teammate conducted interviews with five mentees. Both groups received nearly identical questions, allowing us to explore the perspectives of both parties and understand the dynamics of successful mentoring partnerships.
Survey
While our interview study provided valuable insights, we aimed to explore our third research question (fostering mentorship at Microsoft) on a broader scale.  To achieve this, we developed a survey and disseminated it through various channels. However, the response rate fell short of expectations, limiting the survey's contribution to our final findings.
User Journey Interviews
To gain deeper insights into how mentees decide on mentor compatibility and choose to continue the relationship, my teammate and I conducted five user journey interviews. These interviews explored the entire mentee experience, starting with the decision to seek a mentor, the search process, the initial meeting, and ultimately, their evaluation of compatibility.

Findings Overview

Many of our interview findings successfully triangulated the findings from my literature review.

What works well?

  • Top ways to spark a personal connection are: Finding commonalities, showing interest in topics beyond work life, and alignment of goals (having structure and agenda)
  • Open communication is built upon: Mutual trust (safe space, honesty, boundary setting), reciprocal investment, and mentor modeling
  • Ideal mentoring relationships are tailored to each mentees individual needs
  • Many people find mentors through connections they already have, such as a friend or manager

What are the struggles?

  • Difficult to find mentors that match your unique needs (i.e., role-specific, culture, BIPOC)
  • Lack of time to participate
  • Lack of training and resources
  • Lack of formal mentorship programs, or lack of awareness of current programs
  • Mentees didn’t understand own goals and needs
  • Lack of intrinsic motivation and proactivity from mentors
  • Mentees often want mentors from a different org

A shift in scope

At this point we came to a crossroads - our initial research question and design intent had been to focus on trying to build stronger remote mentoring relationships more quickly and easily. However, our research participants overwhelming shared they felt like personal connection and trust were most quickly and easily built through good mentoring matches, and it was difficult for many people to find good mentor matches.

We decided, after discussing with our stakeholders and other mentors, to follow what the research insights were revealing and to potentially include the mentor matching phase in our design.

Designing a solution based on research insights

As a team, we each developed rough feature concepts through a crazy eights design exercise, which we shared and voted on with each other. We developed 3 concepts which our designers shared with potential users in concept testing. From that testing, we created a final concept using various parts of each concept focusing on the following insights:

Usability testing & beyond

My teammate Connie and I conducted usability testing with 7 participants. We recruited from our previous participant pool, by posting on Slack, and having our sponsors share our recruitment screener.

Due to the speed at which we needed to deliver our results to the designers, we created a more visual version of our affinity diagram, seen below. This included screenshots and usability issue callouts, participant quotes or notes, and design recommendations, along with metrics such as our single ease questionnaire, task success, and SUS.

Our initial overview of usability findings

The final product!

Personalized Mentorship Matching

The Insight

Participants expressed a desire for improved mentor matching, particularly those seeking mentors within specific demographics or areas of interest (e.g., women in tech, individuals with disabilities, etc).

The Design Solution

Mentor matching includes a matchmaking questionnaire, data-driven best matches, and a robust filtering system (including interests, organizations, roles, and more).

AI-supported goal creation, meeting notes, and agenda-setting

The Insight

Mentees expressed uncertainty about initiating conversations with mentors, creating goals, and structuring meetings with their mentors.

The Design Solution

CoPilot integration throughout the mentorship journey, which providing guidance on goal creation, drafting introduction messages, finding mutual availability, and taking meeting notes.

Dashboard with mentorship stats that support career growth

The Insight

Both mentors and mentees shared that mentoring is important at Microsoft as it is a part of their Connect, a performance review system. They also shared they wanted to receive mentoring in order to better understand Microsofts corporate culture, so they could get promoted.

The Design Solution

Mentorship progress tracker to help MS employees create clear, measurable goals that demonstrate personal development and can be shared during performance reviews to support career advancement

Product Video

Capstone Reflections

Future Work

We're proud to have delivered a core product that empowers Microsoft employees to find their ideal mentor matches, streamlines goal and agenda creation, and facilitates ongoing mentoring relationships through a dedicated living document – all within the constraints of the project timeline.  However, with additional time, we'd be eager to pursue further development in these areas:

Future Research

  • Further Usability Testing: Further usability testing should be conducted to validate whether the significant changes to our designs resulted in improved performance metrics.
  • Connect Research: Feedback on the Connect integration was varied on what it would look like. It would be valuable to explore participants wants and fears in further detail. 
  • Further Qualitative Feedback: Due to significant revisions to the dashboard features, gathering further qualitative feedback from users, such as exploring perception of the new features, and likelihood of use, would be valuable.
  • Competitor Interviews: Due to limitations with accessing public information on competitor companies, if given more time, we plan to conduct phone interviews with employees who work at companies with well-established mentorship initiatives (such as Google and LinkedIn) to gain “insider” insights on how their mentorship programs are structured. 

Future Design

  • Mentor User Flow and Experience: Our design primarily focused on the mentee experience as mentees had higher needs and pain points. Potential areas of exploration for the mentor path include: What does the platform and onboarding process look like if someone is both a mentor and a mentee? How might mentors use the dashboard? Do their data needs differ from mentees? How would the homepage and explore look for mentors?
  • Settings: The current Settings page was left undesigned.
  • Profile: There is an expandable menu that allows users to see the profile options (such as “Change Default Preferences,” and “Favorited Mentors”), but we did not design those pages. 
  • Matchmaking: While our matchmaking process is somewhat designed, how matches should be made and each data point weighted was not discussed in much depth.

Limitations

1. Although this project was sponsored by Microsoft, it was not tied to a particular product, vision, or business goal, which slowed down our project, and limited our access to internal Microsoft resources that could have been very helpful. This was found at every step of the way:

2. The problem our final solution addressed had a much larger scope than we initially anticipated, and the short time frame was not enough to conduct thorough iteration cycles. Though we conducted one round of usability testing, some of the changes we made following those tests were fairly significant, and further research could be beneficial.

3. We also left the mentor path of the platform completely undesigned. We decided early on that we wanted to design something practical that could be easily implemented at Microsoft to suit their employees mentorship needs. Though this ensured a feasible solution to fit user needs, it’s worth considering if our design requirements constrained our creativity, and there may be room to explore more creative approaches to mentoring in the future.

Personal Reflections

I'm incredibly grateful for the opportunity to have collaborated with such a fantastic team and our sponsors at Microsoft. This project was ambitious and presented us with unforeseen challenges, but through it all, we functioned as a truly cohesive unit. Even when disagreements arose, we fostered a culture of respectful dialogue, leading to shared understanding and effective compromises.