A Six-Week Mentorship Model That Removes the Awkwardness

Asking for help is rarely the hard part for developers at Shopify—it’s figuring out who to ask and how to frame the ask without it becoming a burden. Pair programming and code reviews handle immediate blockers well, but longer-term growth conversations often fall by the wayside. To close that gap, Shopify’s RnD Learning Team built a structured mentorship program designed around a simple premise: make the commitment short, the goals concrete, and the signup process entirely voluntary.

Before building anything, the team surveyed developers to understand what they actually wanted. The results pointed to three things: developers enjoy learning from colleagues, struggle to carve out dedicated learning time, and want to grow both technically and in leadership. The program that emerged runs in six-week cycles, requires about an hour per week from each participant, and gives everyone a clear exit ramp—no long-term obligation, no awkward “will you be my mentor?” conversation.

How the Signup and Matching Work

Every quarter, developers receive an email inviting them to join the next cycle as a mentee, a mentor, or both. The program team also posts reminders in prominent Slack channels when the signup window opens.

During signup, mentees select areas of interest while mentors select areas of expertise. The available tracks are:

  • Back-end
  • Data
  • Datastores
  • Front-end
  • Infrastructure
  • Mobile – Android
  • Mobile – iOS
  • Mobile – React Native
  • Non-technical (leadership, management)

Mentors can also indicate whether they’re available to support one or two mentees per cycle.

Once signup closes, an automated script pairs people based on a few criteria: the mentor cannot be the mentee’s current lead, the two cannot report to the same lead, their chosen areas must align, and the mentee’s job level must be equal to or lower than the mentor’s. The matching system deliberately ignores geography and department so that participants build a broader network and gain company context they otherwise wouldn’t encounter. Both parties are notified via email and invited to a kickoff meeting where program organizers explain the structure and what each role should expect.

Shorter Is Better

The six-week time box is central to the design. It lowers the barrier to entry: developers can try the program, connect with someone new, and walk away guilt-free if it’s not a fit. Because signup is voluntary and the commitment is explicit, mentors who join are genuinely invested, and mentees know their mentor chose to be there. Signup materials repeatedly stress that each role requires a minimum of one hour per week for the full six weeks.

Goals That Move

Before the first meeting, mentees identify technical skill gaps they’d like to address. In that first session, mentor and mentee collaborate to turn those gaps into a tangible goal to pursue over the cycle. The program team is upfront that goals will likely shift, and that’s fine—the goal is a vehicle for growth, not a finish line.

Crafting the initial goal tends to be the hardest part for mentees, so mentors are expected to help shape it. The program team also shares real examples from past cycles to give mentees a starting point.

Supporting the Community Outside Weekly Meetings

Between one-on-one sessions, participants stay connected through two Slack channels. The first is public and open to curious employees as well as participants. It’s used to advertise the program and keep a steady conversation going: participants share wins, discuss how their goals have evolved, and offer tips to other pairs.

The second channel is private and limited to the program team and mentors. It’s a space where mentors can candidly raise challenges and lean on peers for suggestions. A real exchange from a past cycle shows how valuable this can be:

Mentor 1: My mentee’s original goal was “learn how Shopify core works” and we’ve scoped that down to “learn how jobs are run in core” but we still don’t have it being something that’s measurable and can clearly be ticked off by the end of the 6 weeks. They aren’t the most receptive to refining the goal so I’m curious how any of you have approached that as well?
Mentor 2: I’d try to get to the “why” when they say they want to learn how Shopify core works. Is it so they can find things easier? Make better decisions by having more context? Are they interested in why it’s structured the way it is to inform them on future architecture decisions? Maybe that could help in finding something they can measure. Or if they’re just curious, could the goal be something like being able to explain to someone new to Shopify what the different components of the system are and how they interact? Or they’re able to create a new job in core in x amount of time?
Mentor 3: If you've learned how something works, you should be able to tell someone else. So I turn these learning goals into a goal to write a wiki page or report, make a presentation, or teach someone else one on one.
Mentor 1: I surfaced adapting the learning goal to have an outcome so they've decided on building an example that can be used as documentation and shared with their team.

A Guidebook for Extra Structure

A mentorship guidebook is available for participants who want more than the Slack channels provide. It’s entirely optional but popular with first-time mentors and mentees who appreciate guardrails around what can otherwise feel like an open-ended relationship. The guidebook offers sample agendas for first meetings, example goals, and concrete ways to support a mentee—like inviting them to shadow a meeting with a debrief afterward, pairing on a task, or reviewing code together.

Mentors Get Something Too

The program isn’t only about advancing mentees. Teaching a technical concept reinforces it for the mentor as well, and mentors report that the higher-level career conversations give them clarity about their own paths. One participant noted:

“Taking a step back from my day-to-day work to meet with [them] and chatting about career goals at a higher level, gave me more insight into what I personally want from my career path as well.”

Mentorship is also a valued skill at Shopify—expected more from engineers as they progress. The program offers a low-stakes place to practice and refine that craft through repeated cycles.

Closing the Loop

At the end of each six-week cycle, pairs exchange constructive feedback. Participants then receive a survey asking whether they’d recommend the program, what stood out as the best part, and what should change. The program team turns that feedback into adjustments within a month, and the next cycle kicks off with fresh pairing opportunities. The result is a mentorship experience that’s bounded in time, supported by a community, and deliberately free of the anxiety that usually comes with asking for guidance.

Results and Lessons From the First Cycles

The program has seen strong adoption in its first year. More than 300 developers have taken part as mentees and over 200 as mentors. Survey feedback has been positive: 98% of respondents said they would recommend the program to a colleague. Demand also outstrips supply — each cycle, the team has to turn away interested mentees because there aren't enough mentors. Attracting more mentors is a key focus for 2021.

Participants consistently point to five areas where the program delivers the most value:

  • Building relationships: Forming connections with colleagues is difficult in normal times, and nearly impossible in a fully remote setting. The program creates a structured way to make those connections happen.
  • Dedicated weekly learning time: When workloads are heavy, professional development is often the first thing to slip. Having a set time each week for mentorship makes learning a priority rather than an afterthought.
  • Developing technical craft: Mentees get direct, hands-on opportunities to deepen their engineering skills.
  • Developing mentoring skills: For mentors, the program offers real practice in teaching and supporting peers — skills that are hard to build without a safe environment and willing participants.
  • Gaining broader company context: Shopify values "T-shaped" developers — engineers who have deep expertise in one area (the vertical bar of the T) but also working knowledge across other domains (the horizontal bar). Mentorship helps people get outside their silos and understand how different parts of the company operate.

Investing in engineers this way helps individuals advance their careers while making overall teams more effective.

A few external resources helped shape the program's design: