 Hi, everyone. My name is Mike Hergenreider, and I'm currently a product manager at Waymo. Before we begin, I want to give a quick thank you to Product School for inviting me to talk about something near and dear to my heart, which is mentorship and how to look at it effectively from a mentee and mentor perspective. Before we get started, just want to quickly level set about me and why I care about this topic so much. I have about 10 years of experience as a product manager and a stint in technical program management. I've specialized in machine learning-powered products and services across the four companies you see below, where at Microsoft, I worked on personalized ad prediction and clicks. At Google, I worked on modeling capacity for search and knowledge graph initiatives to these resources effectively at internet scale. At Apple, I was the product management lead for the Siri Knowledge Group, which had two missions. First was to answer any open-domain knowledge question on the Siri Assistant worldwide, and secondly was to provide a structured source of truth for the broader company to leverage as well. Now at Waymo, I work on strategic machine learning initiatives, as well as applying machine learning to our motion planning of where should the car go next after perceiving the world. Some of my non-professional passions include snowboarding, scuba diving, reading, and learning lots of languages, but I'm here to talk about one of my favorite professional passions today, which is mentorship. And there's really three reasons for this. The first is that I view mentorship as a high ROI skill and development tool for both parties. And I think back to my personal experience and the just broad, outsized impact that my mentors and mentees have had on my learnings overall on my career. The second is that mentorship is highly fulfilling for me as an activity. I really value growth, not just my own, but really when I see others grow based on the relationships I've had and things that I can provide help on. I just get extra fulfilled by that in particular, both for just others who are my mentees, as well as broader teams with myself as a product lead. And then third, I just really found that this topic is a lot less visible. I haven't found it be available as much. And when I really want to rewind my career and think about what's maybe one area that I would have wanted to learn more about and understand more, it would have been this one. And so that's why I want to provide a starter kit for you today to provide what I would hope to my younger self would appreciate as well. So how I'll do that is I want to go quickly into what do I define as mentorship and what are the reasons that I think others should really care and get into it. And then the second one is let's define what an effective relationship looks like from my own mental model, from the start of it to the ongoing execution of it, and then just three special scenarios at the end that maybe I've exposed to and might be useful for you as well. All right, so if you didn't want to watch the whole thing, really it comes down to these three things. Mentorship is a development tool that is based on an ongoing relationship that really accelerates the mentee's problem solving and ultimate career development for a mentor exposing them to questions, experience, and feedback. The so what of this is not just for the mentee for the high ROI of time spent, but also for mentors to build leadership and empathy skills, as well as organizations to foster more inclusive environments from the ground up. And my call to action, among many questions I'll ask of you today, is if you're not already a mentee or mentor for someone, I encourage you to seek this out and would ask, what is stopping you? So let's define who and what are mentors. And instead of using language like synonyms, or it's a coach or an advisor or a sounding board, I'd like to say more concretely, what should mentors or what do they do for me? So I look at it this sentence, in an ongoing relationship, they provide questions, personal experience, and feedback that will broaden my exposure and thinking and ultimately catalyze my learning and development. And so I think there's a couple of levels of so what here, where really you can have my thinking challenged, I can learn new ideas, I can really experiment beyond just what experience might teach me. And I also use the word catalyze here specifically beyond just accelerate because to catalyze something, there has to be something existing already. And as a mentee, I'm really responsible for my career. And so I have to be developing something myself already, where a mentor can come in and take that to the next level. And I would ask you, who plays this type of mentor role for you today and whom do you play it for? Now, who can mentor me? I would encourage you to look quite broadly. I personally have an opinion that everybody has valuable experience, no matter what level of seniority you are or where you work. And really this can happen inside the org and outside. So perhaps the most obvious ones would be your people manager. It might be your product management peers who can introduce you to more things. I've actually found my cross-functional peers are also insanely valuable mentors as well. There's also in many organizations, employee resource groups based around identity or interests, things that can really help empower people there as well. And then finally, I've also reached out and had mentor and mentee relationships with experts and people that just resonate with me outside. It can just be a, hey, I saw you present about X and I really love to learn more and we fostered a relationship in that way. Two principles I wanted to also note quickly that may be somewhat obvious, but maybe not. First is that you can and are absolutely recommended to have more than one mentor. I like to advocate for more than one for diversity of thoughts, just to make sure it's not too biased across one particular person's experience. And some of these mentors that I have, I really like to emulate what they do. Others, I have them and they provide a really great challenge for me. And really I'm only limited by the amount of time that I can commit here. We'll talk more about that later. And really you can be a mentee and a mentor at the same time. This can be for the same person where you both have just different experiences and you can share peer to peer. It can also be more of a pay it forward where I can be a mentor for someone else who can then go on to mentor someone else. And so I would leave you with these two questions as well is when you think about potential mentors, who do you want to learn from? And then on the flip side, are there people who may want to learn from you? Now, that might be very well, all good Mike, but why should I care and why should I participate? And I would have to say that it's actually surprising but maybe unsurprising that fewer people in the professional landscape have mentors than you might think. Only just over half say that they've ever had a mentor of the 3,000 American professional sample and only about four in 10 say they actively have a mentor right now. And this resonates with me just because I've in the past never really been exposed to this. But what's interesting is that most of them also find the whole mentorship, mentorship, relationship quite valuable and important. And so there's many reasons why this is valuable from my own experience and confirmed by research, confirmed by testimonials from others where really you can be proficient in your role a lot faster, be able to go farther. And really there's that forcing function that accountability function and that confident for you to always have somebody looking out for your best interests as well as make sure that you're achieving your goals in the direction that you like. All of which are associated with faster career development and satisfaction, both for the mentee, obviously but even for mentors. And I would extend that, that it's even more valuable and critical for mentors and orgs for more reasons. So for mentors, you can really sharpen your empathy where we have to listen first to really understand before we just start doling out suggestions or any sort of advice. The second one is that we really need to sharpen our leadership and critical thinking skills and mentorship really does that because it forces us to ask questions and keep digging in with limited amounts of time since we are not gonna necessarily be in that solution area ourselves. And then the third, I would argue it's not just a benefit, but even a responsibility for us as a product management team to create a broader, higher performing team. If there are others who have less experience or would like help, I think it's our responsibility to be able to help them where they need it. And for organizations, there's really two dimensions by which this is extra valuable. So mentee mentor relationships help foster inclusive learning-based cultures from the ground up. It's what behaviors do we want in our culture and I would argue that this is one of the most beneficial ones. And moreover, it provides higher retention if you wanna think about it from a bottom line perspective. If you look at a study in Sun Microsystems over five years, there was 50% higher retention for those who have been involved in a mentee mentor relationship than those who are not over that period of five years. And especially when we think about two things relevant today in particular, which is diversity, equity, inclusion initiatives, and we think about remote work and the pandemic that's been going on, really it's more critical than ever to establish these types of confidant, accountability, inclusive type relationships where we all can feel that there's employee engagement and someone looking out for us and someone willing to help show us the ropes. And so I think, especially when we're isolated or when we come from different backgrounds or are really trying to advocate for higher diversity, higher inclusion, I would argue that this in particular is a crucial activity to enable that. And now, since we're talking in product school, I'd like to talk about PMs specifically. I would state that mentorship is not only important, but the skills also transfer quite well. And so when I think about the PM role, it actually has a lot of uncertainty and high variance across organizations because there's a lot of white space, there's a lot of areas where different orgs or different teams might not even understand what a PM is or they might have different expectations about how they wanna operate with PMs. And really if there's mentors in your organization or outside who are PMs, they can help you navigate across two dimensions. The first one is that they can not only help you make you more effective within the org that you're in and how you can navigate these relationships, but also they can help instruct you on long-term, is this the expectation of the role that you desire? Is this something that will fit for you? Now, where do the mentorship skills transfer from both the mentee and mentor side? In two areas of PM. The first is that PM is highly collaborative today across many functions. We have a lot of cross functional partners in legal and marketing and business operations and engineering and design, you name it. That can all help us learn the aspects of the business across the spectrum, which we're responsible for. And vice versa, we can take what we've learned and teach others as well. And mentee ship also helps us develop empathy and cut down what Marty Kagan and group like to refer to as viability risk, which is, have we gone within the constraints of how people think about the solution should be? Do I understand enough about how legal approaches the problem or marketing approaches the problem, such that if they're not in a meeting, I can represent them well enough or I can at least make sure that they're represented as part of the final solution. And finally that PM is really just a leadership role without formal authority. And so in modern leadership, it's critical to empower and align the team and mentorship skills about providing context or personal experience or even asking the right questions. That's what really helps drive this type of problem solving to ensure ownership across your group and also scale decision making because as PMs, we cannot make every decision, especially for scalable problems and solutions. Therefore we need to rely on our team and provide questions and enable that type of ownership. Now, one could also say, well, isn't experience just the greatest teacher? And I would argue, yes, that is true, but it's also just one tool for growth and mentorship can complement this. So experience by its own, it takes time to get that. You have to go through the trials in order to get a full experience and learn everything. So that's much slower than mentorship, which can give you some early guardrails. The second one is that increases my risk. When I knew, I have a lot of unknown unknowns. I might not know what to look out for. There might be some helpful people around me who can give me some of those guide rails about what to focus on or what not to focus on, as well as personal experience for, oh, I tried that in the past and here's where it didn't work out. And then finally, if we just look at experience, I think we're missing out on the parallelism of our broader organizations. So we limit our exposure when we're just thinking single track, my mind, my experience, my one lifetime, versus looking more broadly and saying there are another people here who have something to teach me and I can learn deeply not only about them and how to work with them, but how to become more effective for myself and about the exposure for the problem where I can learn more. Now, all of a sudden, mentorship indeed does need to be done very well because we know from a meta analysis at Cornell and other research that ineffective mentors could do more harm than good either due to extreme dependence or absence, et cetera. And that's where I wanna go into the next section is let's talk about effectiveness from the start of this to the ongoingness of it to some special situations. So let's go back and think about it from a product management perspective. What stops us from being a mentee or a mentor today? When we think that 37% have actually actively having a mentor right now, when we think of only 76% believe it's important, how might we drive those numbers up? What are some error buckets or some gaps in roadblocks? So I think I've addressed the first two earlier where is mentorship generally valuable? I hope I've addressed that. I also can't find anyone. I hopefully I've also addressed that as well with the broad definition, but I wanted to tackle three other potential roadblocks here, which is tactically, I'm not sure how to start. The second one is I just wonder if my involvement is gonna be valuable. Is there something with me? And then third, I don't necessarily know how to do this effectively, confidently. So I don't know whether I should even proceed. And so let's talk about how to start things. So really the keyword here is all about admission. In the end, there may be a couple of channels where this happens organically. So for example, a company or a group may have a mentor mentee program and about 71% of the Fortune 500 say they do. But what I've seen and what I've seen my mentee see as well is in their organizations, this often can have limited visibility or access. It's hard to create this type of program at scale. And so you might not be able to be in that first wave. The second avenue that may happen organically is that somebody might reach out to you first. They might want you to be a mentor to them or a mentee. And so that's great if those happen, but those are a little bit more rare, especially as you've seen the numbers for how many people are exposed. And so what I would advocate is three things. Let's not assume, let's not wait for this to happen, and let's not limit it to just those two channels. Instead, I recommend to ensure that this happens. Really try to build a relationship with someone. And you can start with two things, a set of specific questions that you're looking for from them, and a set of starter goals of just what you want to achieve with them out of this particular relationship. And then ultimately you can see what develops. Starting with a broad question like, will he be my mentor or mentee? That's a very deep commitment question to lead with. So we might want to back off that one a little bit unless you know the person quite deeply and have been developing this over a longer period of time. As a mentee, some starter questions I can do, let's say asking out for coffee or just online is can I think your brain or get your feedback about something in particular that you're an expert in? On the mentor side, it's can I give you feedback about something or even more, do you want to partner with me on something where that person can learn more from you directly? And so that's really all it takes. And I built several mentee and mentor relationships like this or that's come in just because it becomes more personal and direct for the relationship you want to build. And I'll also provide the caveat that the other person may not have the bandwidth or the interest or otherwise, and that's okay. Like you will have plenty of other mentor and mentee opportunities to proceed with. Now to get to those, I wanted to tackle a mental roadblock which is what if I don't feel that my contributions are valuable or we have to talk quickly about imposter syndrome or if you look at the diagram on the left, imposter syndrome is essentially feeling that I have a limited set of knowledge and everyone else knows everything else that I don't and it's separate. And I only know a subset. So therefore my contributions won't feel as valuable because everybody else already knows this and why am I feeling inadequate? Where the reality is everybody knows about a lot of different things and we all know a cross section around those as well. And so when I think about this in the context of mentee and mentor, I wanna leave you with these messages. From a mentor perspective, you have valuable and unique experience where no matter what you have, the reality is what you should be looking at here where there's experience that you have good or bad that is unique and helpful. Mentees, I would also say your time is valuable, your questions are valuable. Others really like to be helpful. They really like to be consulted. When we look at data from an org mentorship program pilot in one of my companies, there was hundreds that signed up within the first few hours. It was everybody really wanted this because they see the value. And what's interesting for mentees is that the number of mentors who signed up compared to the number of invited mentees was two to one. And so you can see how many people just want to be helpful or provide something to the broader org. And so I would say that it's imperative to also get involved in a mentorship relationship because when we think about the broader imposter syndrome of, oh, I don't know if I fit in this org or if my experience is relevant, even if the left side of this diagram were true, a mentorship relationship can help you feel out faster how to gain more of that experience. It can just teach you the ropes. It can help you experience this overall or without having to kind of just walk through and feel inadequate. It can give you that confidence. And that's really what I advocate for as a key driver to battle out this imposter syndrome. All right, so let's say now you've officially had somebody that you've started to develop a relationship with as a mentor. I would recommend three things to concretize it. The first one is establishing safety. And I think I tend to do this to three ways. The first one is learning about the person on a personal level beyond just what they can provide for you to avoid that kind of all give, all, I'm sorry, all take no give. And then there's two other things that I like to do. The first one is keeping everything confidential by default to really have that kind of confident atmosphere until one of us asked to share it for some other reason. And then the second one is establishing explicit consent for coaching feedback, which is, providing some suggestions or questions to spur thinking as well as a value to feedback of where do I stand right now compared to some baseline that my mentor might know about. The second one is goals and principles. So what are we both hoping to get out of this relationship? And what do we expect from one another when it comes to how are we gonna operate together? The third one is just more tactical. What's the cadence? And this is really how much time can we commit and dedicate to this? I've had mentor-mentee relationships where I might spend three hours in a row just talking about things together because we just are trying to tackle a hard problem all the way to maybe a one text message check-in on a quarterly basis. Hey, how is everything going? Anything you'd like to discuss? Nope, I'm good, let's check in next quarter. Great. And then really think about the when, how often it means, are we gonna talk about this? Virtually, are we gonna talk about it on a certain cadence? What time is convenient for both of us? Okay, so now let's talk about, once this is all set up, how do we execute it over time? And so, let's talk about first in the same kind of product management framing of this is what does success look like? What is an effective relationship? Let's go back and recall our goals. The first one is that we wanna broaden exposure, challenge the thinking and accelerate the learning of the mentee. That's the top line. And really all the questions and effective definitions you could have will depend on the specific goals and discussion content, but I just wanna give you two areas of questions to consider as a framework. The first is the top level success. And you can ask questions like, hey, have my mentees goals become more clear? Has the mentee learned new approaches towards those goals? Have they improved on some desired skill set? No matter what questions you come up with, the most important is how do we know this? Are we checking in on this? How do we know, you know, has a mentee gotten better at their presentation skills? How do we know? Has a mentee gotten better at influencing groups? How do we know? Who can we ask? Are there surveys? Are there things that we can do to get proof? And then at the second layer is just the relationship itself, the meta analysis. So are both parties engaging with questions and follow-ups? Are both parties feel comfortable and able to share feedback? And are we monitoring the success like I mentioned above on a continuous basis? Now let's start with some principles that I keep in mind as a mentee and a mentor. So the first one as a mentee is that I ultimately am responsible for my career and the solutions that come up with things. I'm in the driver's seat. My mentor is here, as I mentioned, the catalyst. And so what that means is I need to take initiative. I need to prepare for our meetings. I need to drive the agenda and what questions to discuss, what I've already tried and follow up. And this is where I really need to be specific about if there's a problem I'm having and I am feeling stuck, what have I tried so far and really think through that? The next one is be ready to try on and provide this kind of customized feedback back and forth. This is the crucial medium of this particular relationship. And then as a bonus, try to challenge myself or even see if there's opportunities that a mentor could help sponsor for me. And principles I keep in mind as a mentor are quite similar to the ones as a mentee, which is the mentee drives. I kickstart as needed. My personal style is I like to provide three things. The first one is just honest and challenging questions. I learned a lot about this from, especially when I was in a low point in my career, where I really just felt so disengaged and a product that I had just did not ship. A senior member of my team really reached out and gave me honest feedback, challenging questions and ultimately ability. And this is what brought me all the way back from a low point and not even knowing if I wanted to continue as a PM to the highest of highs and being able to continue to achieve. The second one that he provided me and that I like to carry forward is support, positive reinforcement and constant advocacy wherever I possibly can. Knowing that my mentor as a mentee is always in my corner is such an empowering feeling, no matter how hard the challenge is. And then third, providing bonuses and challenges and sponsorship opportunities to mentees. So I think about a couple of my mentees of I wanna make sure that they can get the most out of their PM experience. So having a few interns, having a few temporary PMs with us over the course of time, I really wanted to give them more ambitious projects and goals to really feel like what it's a full PM's job with more coaching and with more support obviously than let's say a senior PM. But they were really able to achieve that and feel a full sense of empowerment and understanding about what PM is and all of them actually have ended up being in full product management positions today. And so I think instead of just, let's say, trying to get some analysis done, it's what is the extra bit? Can you have a mentee own an entire product and drive it end to end? Cause that's really where they get the most exposure and the most ability to have these types of challenges that I can then advise on. Now on the flip side, I need to know my limits. There are some areas that I might not be as effective when I discuss. So when I think about an example of micro aggressions today in the context of diversity and inclusion, I would probably say that I have not experienced the level or the types of micro aggressions that others have, especially for people who come from entirely different backgrounds than me, whether it be from gender or race or experience level, et cetera. And so I need to understand that, hey, when I've had mentees in the past who are not from my same background, come to me and say, hey, I've experienced this particular micro aggression at work, I can really only start with, okay, from a professional context, I want to support you first and foremost. Secondly, to know, have you know that this is unacceptable? And third, the next thing is to refer out, are there others who might have better experience with this? Are there employee resource groups with senior mentors who know more about this and can speak to this personally, whereas I might have a limit there? The second one is, do I have biases? So when I've left various companies, there were certain reasons that were very specific to my own goals. And so when I had other mentees who were at previous companies asked me, why have you left in that type of thing? I always want to provide many, many caveats as far as, hey, this is not encouragement of you to do something similar. This is just my mental framework for what I've thought about. So be very careful and explicit about biases. And then third is power dynamics. So this provides another bias of, for example, if I'm a mentor and I'm providing a suggestion to my mentee, there tends to be this bias of expertise where it's like, oh, this person, you know, they know what they're doing. They've been in this for a while. So why wouldn't I take this? There could even be pressure to take a specific suggestion as opposed to just I'm asking them or collaborating. So be very cognizant that the mentee is not beholden by a specific suggestion just because I might've said it with a little bit more experience. And my ultimate goal is to show mentees with all this that their ceiling is much higher than they think. I've had mentees who've mentioned just getting into these companies or being the first one in college was their ceiling. And coming out of these programs, it's really inspiring to me to say that no, they're way higher than this now. And I want them to keep thinking about what comes next because they can achieve this. All right, so one final principle here is just being very careful with advice, especially when we're discussing problems. The supply has to rules of thumb, commands, best practices, suggestions, and there's four main areas where just advice can cause risk. So first off is that a mentor has incomplete information about a problem or situation a mentee is feeling. We can keep asking questions and that's the more recommended way. If we just throw advice, then we might be providing something that doesn't make sense for this particular person at this time. We don't have enough of the context. And the other problem is that when a mentee receives this advice, they have a lot more unknown unknowns. They don't know about where this advice might have failed or what the assumptions are for this advice or suggestion working. They don't know all the whys to be able to apply it yet. And so it might just create some risk because they go off and create a wrong solution when really it's just kind of a lazy way of solving a problem when the mentee should be doing it. And then the other ones are general advice in particular just doesn't have enough on the specific context on why. Like I mentioned, advice abstracts away a lot of just a statement. So really it takes away a lot of the mentee's thinking of why could X thing solve my problem when a lot of that is buried? And then finally, it plays that power dynamic bias of if I just lay down a piece of advice and I'm more experienced, a mentee may be more biased to try and take that or feel pressure to take that versus really understand is this the best solution for me in a more collaborative environment? And so I really advocate being very careful and using this sparingly with your mentor. So let's think about what do I do instead? I think of the principle that the mentee drives their career and the mentor is not their backseat driver. And to avoid this, I tackle four things. The first is that I tend to prefer more questions. This allows me to learn more and more about the scenario to help tailor any suggestions I may come up with but also empower the mentee's autonomy, ask them what they think, what do they try in order to allow them to really think through the solution. The second one is sharing personal experience where at least what worked for me was and it means that you don't have to have the mentee commit to that because you're just saying, this is what I tried your mileage may vary. The third one is if there are suggestions can we flip them into questions? What about this? What do you think? Cause then this puts the control and the autonomy back on the mentee to be the decision maker about, hmm, I don't know. What if I tried that? Or I don't know where this would work for me and they get that critical thinking. And then finally, any sort of feedback I give I tend to give it in terms of consequences and effects instead of like do this or here's the suggestion. So for example, if I'm helping the mentee improve their presentation, I would say this part is a little bit unclear to me versus word it like this. And so what that means is when I say it's unclear you're giving the why and the so what to the mentee for them to be able to think through what are the potential solutions that would work best. Word it like this also has that extra bit of just go ahead and do that but it doesn't necessarily mean it will solve the problem. The mentee's thought through this a lot more and can think through it more than a mentor can. And so here are some questions about 19 of them total that I really like to ask when, you know, just as the default when we're stuck. So I think of them in four categories for defining goals. I like to think not just what does a mentee want let's say a next promotion or some type of growth but what do they really want? Why do they want that? Is that something that provides more money? Is it more about the expertise? What do they really care about here and how can I help deliver that? The second one is just digging more into exploring scenarios. So what has the mentee tried so far? What else have they or could they try? Let's also think about challenging thinking to my favorite questions both for product management and mentorship is what if to really sense out a sense of possibilities and kickstart some discussions and also what stops you from a specific idea? And then you can see what stops you from let's say a mentee's idea or even just a fluttered out idea and then you can really get into what the mentee is struggling with more. And then finally, no matter how long the conversation or no matter how many topics you cover what's just one good next step that a mentee can follow up on today? Okay, and then let's end with three special scenarios that I feel might be useful for you. So the first one is that my mentee brought up a sensitive or charged emotional topic. And so this one could be quite tricky and I recommend the book Crucial Conversations on this constantly but the first and foremost thing is to be a source of support, really listen, ask questions, really mirror what mentee is telling you to make sure you are absolutely understanding correctly what's happening. And then really ask, what kind of help does this person want? And ask them explicitly, get consent on, hey, I'm just looking to have someone that I can hear me out versus I really want someone to like help me think through this actively. It may just be that this is an emotional particular time and they would just like your help somebody to lean on in this scenario. And then finally, are there others in a good position to help out here? Who else has this mentee talk to? Who else might they be able to talk to? If it's particularly concerning or something that could even border on dangerous or otherwise, is are they familiar with contacts in order to report something? And those are areas where we can advise much better and at least give that kind of meta advice, if you will, to say that there are other people that might be able to help you tackle this as well if you're comfortable. The second one is what if my mentee wants me to solve their problem? And again, you can lean back on some of the principles from earlier, I think, I tend to just keep sticking with questions and what questions does is just keep kickstarting a mentee's thinking to get the full scope of what's going on. So you can look at exploration, we can look backward from just what are the outcomes and what's most important to kind of back up a step. We can look at contrast, what if you did the opposite of something? We can look at how we involved enough people or got enough ideas across the room. And finally some light suggestions, if needed. And then really what helps is take advantage of subconscious processing. When we've been thinking through a topic for a while, sometimes it just helps to sleep on it, to step away. And then suddenly we have that epiphany the next day and really asking the mentee to take some questions, take some time to think about this will really help sidestep this particular problem. And then third, let's back up a step. Are the general expectations clear in this relationship? Are we ensuring that the mentee is not looking for, let's say me as a mentor to just solve all the problems as opposed to accelerate their thinking and accelerate their development? And so if there does need to be a conversation, I encourage having that too. And then finally, my mentorship relationship isn't working out so well. Three diagnostic questions that I like to use. Why isn't it working out well? For example, if the other side is gone, have I checked in on them? Do I know if it's absence, is it just I'm getting too much advice? What is it about that specifically? The second one is, does the other person know my perspective? And oftentimes that isn't the case. And so when I would see, let's say a mentee not follow up on some of the follow-ups that we had discussed, I want to make sure, hey, are you aware that at least for me, I'm not seeing the follow-ups, is this something going on? Can I help with something? And often it would just be, oh my gosh, I had totally forgot or oh my gosh, I missed it or something's been going on. And then third, once this is known to both parties, is there a path and a commitment to fix this on both sides? And if both sides are willing to do that, that's awesome. And if not, it's okay to step away and say we can close out this relationship. This one just doesn't seem to be working according to our expectations. All right, so I want to thank everybody for listening. And I guess the final takeaways are what I like to call mic drops. If you remember nothing else, that mentorship is an ongoing relationship to accelerate the mentee's career development. It's also a win, win, win for the mentors and the organizations as well from building leadership skills and inclusive environments. And then I leave you with of course a call to action. If you are not in a mentee or mentor relationship or position today, I highly encourage seeking this out. And I would ask if you can't, what's stopping you from doing so. So thank you very much again to all of you for listening to Product School. And if you'd like to reach out with any other further questions, my LinkedIn is below. Thank you so much and have a nice day.