How to Give Constructive Feedback, Challenge Your Mentees, and Share Your Experience Without Letting Ego, Cruelty, or Personal Agendas Undermine Their Growth
Mentorship Is a Responsibility, Not a Status Symbol
I have spent a significant part of my career mentoring people in the video game industry, from individuals trying to take the next step in their careers to founders attempting to build companies around their first games. I have also been fortunate enough to have mentors of my own, and I still seek advice from people whose experience or perspective can help me understand something differently. The longer I have done this, the more seriously I have come to view the responsibility involved in mentorship. It is easy to think of mentoring as simply sharing experience with someone who has less of it, but that description ignores the trust involved in the relationship. When someone asks you to become their mentor, they are giving you access to parts of their professional life they may not comfortably share with many other people. How you treat that access matters.
Mentees rarely arrive with perfectly organized problems and emotionally detached questions. They may be worried that their studio is running out of money, struggling with a co-founder, questioning whether their game is commercially viable, or wondering whether they are actually capable of leading the company they have created. They may show you a pitch deck they have spent months preparing only to admit that publishers keep rejecting it. They may talk about a team member they do not know how to manage or acknowledge that they have made a decision they now regret. In those moments, they are exposing uncertainty to someone they believe possesses greater experience than they do. That vulnerability should never be treated casually simply because the mentor has heard similar problems many times before.
There is also a power imbalance in mentoring relationships that experienced professionals can easily underestimate. A mentor may think of a conversation as an informal exchange between two industry colleagues, while the mentee may be speaking with someone whose career they admire or whose opinion they place considerable weight upon. This becomes even more pronounced when the mentor is an established executive, investor, publisher, accelerator mentor, consultant, or well-connected industry figure. A careless comment from someone in that position can carry significantly more weight than the mentor intended because the mentee may assume that experience makes the judgement authoritative. Mentors therefore need to remain conscious not only of what they say but of how their position influences the way those words are received.
That does not mean mentors should become frightened of expressing strong opinions or spend every conversation carefully avoiding anything that might make someone uncomfortable. A mentor who refuses to challenge a mentee because they want to preserve a pleasant relationship is not necessarily doing that person any favours. People often seek mentorship precisely because they want access to experience they do not yet possess, including perspectives that challenge how they currently understand a problem. The responsibility is to use that experience carefully rather than treating it as proof that the mentor must always be correct. There is an important difference between confidently sharing what you have learned and presenting your experience as the final authority on someone else’s circumstances.
I think this distinction becomes particularly important in the games industry because there are so many different paths to success and so many different definitions of what success actually means. Advice that makes perfect sense for someone attempting to build a large studio may be completely inappropriate for a developer who wants to remain independent with a team of five people. The lessons learned managing a AAA production do not automatically transfer to a small narrative game funded through grants and crowdfunding. Even two studios of similar size may operate in different markets, countries, genres, financial circumstances, or stages of development. Experience gives mentors useful patterns to draw upon, but those patterns still have to be interpreted within the reality of the person sitting in front of them.
This is one reason I believe mentors should spend considerably more time understanding before advising. It is tempting when someone describes a familiar problem to immediately reach for the solution that worked in our own career. Sometimes that solution will be useful, but there is also a danger that we begin solving our version of the problem rather than theirs. Asking questions about what the mentee wants, what they have already tried, what constraints they face, and what outcome they would consider successful provides essential context before advice is offered. It also reminds the mentor that their job is not to take control of the situation. The objective is to help another person develop the understanding and confidence necessary to make better decisions for themselves.
Mentorship can absolutely benefit the mentor as well, and I do not think we should pretend otherwise. I have learned a tremendous amount from people I have mentored because they encounter technologies, markets, communities, and creative approaches that are different from those I experienced earlier in my career. Their questions force me to examine assumptions I may not have challenged recently, and sometimes their solutions to problems are better than the ones I would have proposed. Those benefits are healthy because they emerge naturally from two people exchanging experience and perspective. Problems begin when the mentor’s benefit becomes the primary reason for maintaining the relationship and the mentee’s development becomes secondary.
Before agreeing to mentor someone, I therefore think it is worth considering what responsibility you are actually accepting. You are not agreeing to have occasional conversations in which you demonstrate how much experience you have accumulated. You are agreeing to listen carefully, respect someone’s vulnerability, challenge them when necessary, acknowledge the limits of your own knowledge, and use your experience in a way that supports their development. That requires considerably more empathy and self-awareness than simply giving advice. It also means accepting that the measure of successful mentorship is not how impressed the mentee becomes with the mentor, but how much more capable the mentee becomes over time.
Constructive Feedback Requires Empathy
Constructive feedback is one of the most important parts of mentorship because there is little value in seeking an experienced perspective if that perspective never challenges you. I have never believed that good mentorship means constantly reassuring people that everything they are doing is wonderful. If a pitch is unclear, a strategy is unrealistic, a leadership behaviour is damaging a team, or a business model contains a serious weakness, a mentor should be willing to say so. Avoiding the conversation may preserve everyone’s comfort in the short term, but it deprives the mentee of information they specifically entered the relationship to receive. Empathy should not be confused with protecting people from every uncomfortable truth.
Where empathy becomes important is in determining how that truth is communicated. Before giving difficult feedback, I think a mentor should understand what they are trying to accomplish with it. If the objective is to help someone improve their pitch deck, then the feedback should increase their understanding of why the deck is not working and what they can do differently. If the objective is to improve someone’s leadership, the conversation should help them recognise the consequences of their behaviour and identify practical alternatives. The mentor’s emotional satisfaction at having delivered a particularly devastating critique is irrelevant to either objective. Feedback should be judged by whether it creates useful understanding, not by how forcefully it was delivered.
Specificity makes an enormous difference here. Telling someone their pitch is terrible may certainly communicate dissatisfaction, but it provides very little information they can use to improve it. Explaining that the opening slides fail to establish the player experience, that the market positioning is unclear, or that the financial ask is unsupported by the production plan gives the mentee something they can actually address. The criticism may still be difficult to hear, particularly if they have invested months of work in the presentation. However, the conversation remains focused on identifiable problems rather than becoming a judgement about the person’s ability or intelligence. Constructive feedback should give someone a path forward rather than simply informing them that they have fallen short.
Context and timing matter as well, particularly when feedback involves something more personal than a document or business plan. Critiquing someone’s leadership behaviour in front of their employees, peers, or fellow founders can transform useful feedback into humiliation regardless of how accurate the observation might be. There may be situations where group feedback is appropriate, especially when people have explicitly agreed to that format, but mentors should still consider whether the setting helps the mentee learn or merely increases the emotional intensity of the moment. Private conversations often allow people to ask questions, admit uncertainty, and process difficult information without simultaneously worrying about how everyone else in the room perceives them. Protecting someone’s dignity does not require protecting them from criticism.
Proportionality is another part of constructive feedback that can easily be overlooked. Not every mistake deserves the same level of response, and experienced mentors should be capable of distinguishing between a minor weakness and a genuinely serious problem. If every issue is treated as catastrophic, mentees eventually lose the ability to understand which concerns actually require urgent attention. They may also become defensive because mentoring sessions begin to feel like repeated demonstrations of everything they are doing wrong. Good feedback helps people prioritize by explaining not only what could improve but why a particular issue matters relative to everything else competing for their attention.
I also believe mentors need to be careful about separating observation from interpretation. We may see a behaviour or outcome clearly while still misunderstanding the reasons behind it. A founder who appears unprepared may actually have received important information five minutes before the meeting. A producer who seems reluctant to make a decision may be navigating constraints the mentor does not know about. A developer who rejected previous advice may have tried it and discovered circumstances that made it ineffective. Asking questions before assigning motives gives the mentee an opportunity to provide context and reduces the risk that feedback becomes an accusation based on incomplete information.
The best difficult feedback I have received throughout my career has usually left me thinking rather than simply hurting. I may not have enjoyed hearing it, and I certainly have not agreed with every piece of advice I have ever been given, but useful feedback gave me something I could examine after the conversation ended. It helped me understand a blind spot, reconsider an assumption, or recognise that an approach was producing consequences I had not intended. That is what I want constructive feedback to accomplish when I mentor someone else. The purpose is not to eliminate discomfort but to make sure that any discomfort serves a meaningful developmental purpose.
Actionable Steps
- Before giving difficult feedback, identify what you want the mentee to understand or do differently as a result of the conversation.
- Make criticism specific enough that the mentee can act upon it rather than relying on broad judgements about quality or ability.
- Consider timing, setting, and privacy before delivering feedback that may be personally difficult to receive.
- Distinguish between what you have directly observed and what you are assuming about the reasons behind it.
- Match the intensity of your feedback to the seriousness of the problem so the mentee can understand what genuinely requires attention.
Radical Candor Is Not Permission to Be Cruel
I understand why concepts such as radical candor, brutal honesty, tough love, and even roast-style feedback have become attractive in leadership and entrepreneurial environments. There are plenty of organizations where people avoid difficult conversations until problems become impossible to ignore. Managers sometimes soften performance feedback so extensively that employees leave meetings believing everything is fine when significant concerns actually exist. Founders can surround themselves with people who enthusiastically support every idea because nobody wants to be the person who challenges the CEO. Mentors can contribute to the same problem if they become so focused on encouragement that they stop providing the critical perspective their experience is supposed to offer. Directness developed as a response to a legitimate leadership problem, and dismissing it entirely would ignore why people found the concept valuable in the first place.
The problem begins when directness stops being a method of communication and becomes a performance. There is a particular kind of professional who seems to take pride in being the person willing to say what everyone else supposedly lacks the courage to say. The harshness itself becomes part of their identity, and the discomfort they create is treated as evidence that the feedback must be valuable. At that point, the conversation is no longer primarily about the recipient’s development. It becomes an opportunity for the person giving the feedback to demonstrate their confidence, authority, experience, or unwillingness to conform to ordinary social expectations. Mentorship is especially vulnerable to this behaviour because the existing power imbalance makes it difficult for the mentee to challenge the way they are being treated.
Calling something a roast does not automatically remove that responsibility. If people knowingly agree to a playful format and understand the boundaries involved, humour can certainly make feedback engaging and memorable. However, the label should never become permission to say things that would otherwise be considered inappropriate, unnecessarily personal, or humiliating. A mentor still has to read the room, understand the relationship, and recognise when criticism has stopped being productive. The fact that someone agreed to receive strong feedback does not mean they agreed to surrender their dignity. Experienced leaders should be capable of providing challenging criticism without needing ambiguity on that point.
Public criticism deserves particular care because the presence of an audience changes the purpose and consequences of feedback. Once other people are watching, there is a temptation for the mentor to become more entertaining, more dramatic, or more forceful than they would be during a private conversation. The mentee may also become more defensive because they are no longer processing only the criticism itself. They are simultaneously thinking about how colleagues, investors, employees, or peers now perceive them. A useful observation can therefore become much harder to absorb simply because the format has introduced embarrassment that was never necessary to communicate the underlying message.
There is also a meaningful difference between discomfort that results naturally from difficult feedback and discomfort deliberately manufactured by the person delivering it. Discovering that your business plan contains a serious weakness will probably feel uncomfortable regardless of how respectfully the information is communicated. Learning that your management style is damaging morale may be even harder to hear. A mentor does not need to remove those emotional consequences because they are part of confronting an important problem. What the mentor should avoid is adding unnecessary humiliation, sarcasm, personal attacks, or theatrical harshness on top of an already difficult realization.
Empathy is what allows candor to remain constructive because it forces the mentor to consider the experience of the person receiving the feedback without abandoning the substance of the message. It asks whether the criticism is specific, proportionate, useful, and delivered in a setting where the mentee can actually engage with it. It also requires enough humility to recognise that the mentor’s interpretation may not be completely correct. None of those considerations weaken honest feedback. They make it more precise because the mentor has to think carefully about what actually needs to be communicated instead of simply rewarding themselves for being fearless enough to say something harsh.
Mentors should ultimately judge difficult conversations by what happens after them. A mentee may leave temporarily disappointed, frustrated, or even angry, and those reactions do not automatically mean the mentor handled the conversation badly. Difficult feedback sometimes needs time before a person is ready to accept it. The more important question is whether the mentee leaves with greater clarity about the issue and enough understanding to decide what they should do next. If the only lasting result is that they feel smaller, embarrassed, or reluctant to seek advice again, the mentor should seriously consider whether the conversation served the mentee’s growth or merely satisfied the mentor’s desire to demonstrate candor.
Actionable Steps
- Use directness to increase clarity rather than to demonstrate how fearless you are about giving criticism.
- Never assume that an invitation for honest feedback removes your responsibility to remain professional and appropriate.
- Be especially careful with criticism delivered in front of an audience, where embarrassment can overwhelm the substance of the advice.
- Allow difficult truths to create their own discomfort instead of adding humiliation, sarcasm, or personal attacks.
- After a difficult mentoring conversation, ask whether the mentee now understands the problem more clearly and has something useful they can do about it.
Mentorship Should Be About the Mentee
One of the questions I believe every mentor should ask themselves periodically is why they are mentoring in the first place. There are many good reasons to do it, including wanting to give something back to an industry that has provided opportunities throughout your career, helping someone avoid mistakes you once made, or simply enjoying the process of watching another person develop. Mentoring can also be intellectually rewarding because working with people facing different challenges forces you to examine your own assumptions and experiences more carefully. None of those motivations require complete selflessness, and I do not think pretending otherwise makes mentorship healthier. The important question is whether the mentor’s interests remain compatible with the development of the person who trusted them for guidance.
Problems begin when mentorship gradually becomes more about the mentor’s identity than the mentee’s development. Being able to describe yourself as a mentor, advisor, coach, or industry veteran can certainly carry professional value, particularly in an industry where reputation and networks matter. Accelerator programs create visibility, mentoring roles can lead to speaking opportunities, and association with promising founders or studios can strengthen someone’s professional profile. None of those outcomes automatically make the relationship inappropriate. However, they can subtly change the mentor’s incentives if maintaining visibility or demonstrating expertise begins influencing how they behave with the people they are supposed to support.
Social media has made this temptation even more complicated because almost every professional activity can now become content. A mentoring session can become a photograph, a conference interaction can become a post, and someone else’s success can easily become part of the mentor’s personal narrative. There is nothing inherently wrong with celebrating people you have helped, particularly when they are comfortable with it and deserve recognition for what they have achieved. The problem occurs when the mentor begins treating the relationship as evidence of their own importance. The mentee’s journey then risks becoming supporting material for someone else’s personal brand rather than something that belongs primarily to the person doing the difficult work.
This can influence the advice itself in ways that are not always obvious. A mentor who has built a reputation around a particular leadership philosophy may become invested in demonstrating that philosophy works. Someone known for scaling companies may instinctively encourage growth even when remaining small might better serve the founder’s goals. A mentor who publicly advocates a particular production methodology may have difficulty acknowledging that another approach is working perfectly well for the team sitting in front of them. Once our professional identity becomes attached to a particular answer, listening objectively becomes harder because changing our advice can feel like challenging something we have already told the world about ourselves.
The best protection against this is curiosity. Before deciding what someone should do, I want to understand what they are actually trying to achieve. A founder seeking investment may ultimately want to build a large studio, but they may instead be trying to secure enough funding to finish one deeply personal game. A developer asking about career progression may want management responsibility, or they may simply want greater creative influence while remaining an individual contributor. If I assume their definition of success matches mine, I can provide perfectly reasonable advice that leads them toward a future they never wanted. Mentorship becomes far more useful when the destination belongs to the mentee and the mentor helps them understand the routes available to reach it.
This also means resisting the temptation to measure mentoring success by whether someone follows your advice. Advice should be taken seriously, particularly when it comes from relevant experience, but the mentee still owns the decision and its consequences. They may have information the mentor does not possess, priorities they have not fully articulated, or simply a different appetite for risk. If they listen carefully, consider the advice, and ultimately choose another direction, that is not necessarily evidence that the mentoring relationship has failed. Helping someone become capable of making a thoughtful decision is more important than training them to obey the person with greater experience.
There will also be occasions when the mentee makes a decision the mentor believes is wrong and the outcome confirms that concern. Those situations can be frustrating, especially when the consequences might have been avoided by following earlier advice. The temptation to say “I told you so” can be surprisingly strong because everyone enjoys having their judgement validated. Yet that response provides very little value to someone who is already dealing with the consequences of a mistake. A more useful conversation examines what happened, why the decision made sense to them at the time, which assumptions proved incorrect, and what they can learn before facing a similar situation again.
Healthy mentorship therefore requires a certain amount of emotional distance from the outcome. I can care deeply about whether someone succeeds without needing their success to validate my advice or enhance my reputation. I can disagree strongly with a decision while respecting that it belongs to them. I can provide perspective, challenge assumptions, identify risks, and explain what my experience suggests without expecting control in return. That balance keeps mentorship focused where it belongs, on developing another person’s judgement rather than demonstrating the mentor’s authority.
Actionable Steps
- Periodically examine why you mentor and whether your behaviour still reflects the development of the mentee as the primary objective.
- Ask mentees how they define success before recommending strategies based on your own career or ambitions.
- Avoid measuring your effectiveness by how frequently people follow your advice exactly as given.
- Be conscious of situations where your public reputation or professional philosophy may make you overly invested in a particular answer.
- When a mentee makes a mistake, focus on helping them understand it rather than demonstrating that your earlier advice was correct.
Your Mentee Is Not a Sales Lead
Mentorship can create unusually strong professional relationships because people often discuss problems in far greater depth than they would during an ordinary networking conversation. Over time, a mentor may develop an excellent understanding of a founder’s company, a developer’s career ambitions, or a studio’s operational challenges. That knowledge can naturally reveal commercial opportunities. A consultant may realise they could help solve a problem directly, an investor may become interested in the company, or an executive may see someone who would be an excellent addition to their team. There is nothing automatically unethical about opportunities emerging from relationships built through mentorship, but the existence of a power imbalance means they need to be approached with considerably more care than an ordinary sales conversation.
The simplest example is consulting. Imagine that a mentor spends several sessions helping a studio founder understand weaknesses in their production process and eventually concludes that the company needs more substantial support than occasional mentoring can provide. If consulting happens to be part of the mentor’s business, offering those services may be completely reasonable. The problem arises when the mentor begins steering conversations toward problems that conveniently require the services they sell or when free guidance becomes deliberately limited to create demand for paid engagement. At that point, the mentee can no longer be certain whether advice is being shaped around their interests or the mentor’s commercial objectives.
The same issue can arise with investment, recruitment, publishing, outsourcing, and almost any other commercial relationship surrounding game development. Mentors often possess extensive networks, and one of the genuine benefits they can provide is connecting people with resources they would struggle to access independently. However, those introductions become more complicated when the mentor has a financial interest in the outcome. If I recommend a company because I receive a referral fee, hold equity in it, or personally benefit from the transaction, that information changes how the mentee should evaluate my recommendation. Transparency does not automatically eliminate every conflict of interest, but it allows the mentee to make an informed decision rather than unknowingly treating commercially motivated advice as independent guidance.
This matters because mentees may feel pressure even when the mentor never intentionally creates it. If someone has invested months helping you, introducing you to people, and providing valuable advice, declining their commercial proposal can feel uncomfortable. The mentee may worry that saying no will damage the relationship or make the mentor less willing to help in the future. A mentor who genuinely wants to protect the relationship needs to anticipate that possibility rather than expecting the mentee to raise it themselves. Commercial discussions should make it exceptionally clear that declining the opportunity will not affect access to mentorship, respect, or future support.
Accelerators and formal mentoring programs deserve particular care because participants may not have chosen their individual mentors in the same way they would through an organic professional relationship. They may reasonably assume that someone introduced as a mentor has been placed there to support their development. Using that access primarily to generate leads, recruit clients, push investments, or promote unrelated business interests risks violating the trust created by the program itself. It can also damage the reputation of the accelerator because participants begin wondering whether other mentors are providing independent advice or evaluating them as potential commercial opportunities. Program organizers therefore have a responsibility to establish expectations around conflicts of interest rather than assuming everyone shares the same understanding of appropriate behaviour.
Another potential problem appears when mentors use their position to push an agenda that benefits them indirectly. Not every conflict involves money changing hands. Someone may encourage a mentee to participate in an event because they want stronger attendance, recommend a community because they are involved in running it, or repeatedly direct people toward initiatives that enhance their own visibility. Any individual recommendation may be entirely reasonable, and mentors should obviously share opportunities they genuinely believe will help. The question is whether the recommendation begins with the mentee’s needs or with something the mentor already wants to promote.
None of this requires mentors to maintain an artificial wall between mentoring and every other professional relationship. Industries are built through networks, and trusted relationships naturally evolve. A person I mentor today might become someone I collaborate with years from now, just as former colleagues can become clients, partners, employers, employees, investors, or friends. Attempting to prohibit those possibilities would be both unrealistic and unnecessary. The healthier approach is to recognize when the nature of the relationship changes and make that transition explicit rather than allowing mentoring influence and commercial interests to become quietly entangled.
The standard I try to apply is relatively straightforward even if implementing it sometimes requires uncomfortable self-reflection. If I stand to benefit materially from a recommendation, the person receiving it should understand that clearly enough to evaluate my advice accordingly. If I would hesitate to disclose my interest because I worry it might change their decision, that hesitation is itself useful information. Mentorship depends heavily on trust, and protecting that trust is usually worth far more than any short-term opportunity that might emerge from exploiting it.
Actionable Steps
- Disclose financial, professional, or personal interests whenever they could reasonably influence advice you are giving a mentee.
- Never deliberately manufacture problems during mentoring conversations in order to sell the solution yourself.
- Make it clear that declining a commercial opportunity will not damage the mentoring relationship or reduce future support.
- Be especially careful about solicitation within accelerators or formal mentoring programs where participants may perceive mentors as trusted representatives of the program.
- When a mentoring relationship develops into a commercial one, acknowledge the change openly and establish appropriate boundaries.
Guide Their Journey Instead of Recreating Yours
Experience is valuable largely because it gives us patterns. After enough years working in an industry, we begin recognising situations that resemble problems we have encountered before. We remember which decisions produced unexpected consequences, which warning signs preceded larger failures, and which opportunities turned out to matter more than we initially expected. This pattern recognition is one of the most useful things an experienced mentor can offer because the mentee may be confronting a particular situation for the first time. The danger is that patterns can become prescriptions if we stop paying attention to the differences between our experience and theirs.
I have worked across different types of studios, countries, teams, business models, and stages of company growth, and one lesson that experience has repeatedly reinforced is how dangerous universal answers can be. What works inside a large organization with significant financial resources may be absurd for an independent developer operating with a handful of people. A production structure appropriate for a team of two hundred can create unnecessary bureaucracy for a team of ten. Advice about publishers, investors, hiring, outsourcing, marketing, or leadership can change dramatically depending on geography, funding, genre, company maturity, and the ambitions of the people involved. Experience becomes useful when it helps identify possibilities and risks, not when it prevents us from seeing circumstances that differ from our own.
Successful people can be particularly vulnerable to this because success creates powerful evidence in favour of the choices they made. If someone built a thriving company by raising investment and scaling quickly, they understandably have confidence in that model. Someone who maintained independence and retained ownership throughout their career may feel equally strongly about avoiding outside capital. Neither perspective is inherently wrong, and both can provide tremendous value to a mentee considering similar decisions. The problem begins when personal success is interpreted as proof that alternative paths are inferior rather than evidence that one particular approach worked under one particular set of circumstances.
Timing makes this even more complicated in the game industry because conditions change remarkably quickly. Advice based on the publishing market from ten years ago may contain useful principles while being completely outdated in its practical application. Platform economics change, development costs rise, funding environments tighten, new distribution channels emerge, and player behaviour evolves. Technologies that once required substantial teams can become accessible to individual developers, while areas that were previously straightforward may become significantly more competitive. Mentors who rely too heavily on the authority of past experience can therefore give confident advice about an industry that no longer exists in exactly the form they remember.
Personal circumstances matter just as much as industry conditions. Two founders with nearly identical companies may reasonably make completely different decisions because one has substantial personal savings while the other supports a family and cannot tolerate the same financial risk. One developer may happily relocate internationally for a career opportunity while another has responsibilities that make relocation impossible. A mentor does not need every detail of someone’s private life, but they do need enough context to understand that apparently optimal professional decisions can carry very different personal costs. Advice that ignores those realities may look excellent on a spreadsheet while being entirely unsuitable for the human being expected to follow it.
This is where questions become more useful than instructions. Instead of telling someone they should raise investment, a mentor can help them understand what investment would allow them to accomplish, what ownership they might surrender, what expectations investors could introduce, and whether those trade-offs align with their ambitions. Rather than simply telling a developer to accept or reject a job, the mentor can help them evaluate compensation, learning opportunities, stability, responsibilities, culture, and long-term career direction. The mentor still contributes experience and may absolutely express a strong opinion. The difference is that the conversation improves the mentee’s decision-making process instead of replacing it.
There is also something deeply rewarding about watching someone reach a good outcome through an approach you would not have chosen yourself. Those moments are useful reminders that mentorship should not produce replicas of the mentor. The industry does not need every emerging leader to think exactly like the generation that preceded them, particularly when many of the problems they will eventually solve have not yet appeared. Good mentors provide context, history, pattern recognition, and perspective while leaving enough room for the mentee to develop their own leadership philosophy. That independence is not a failure of influence. It is evidence that the relationship is helping another person become capable of navigating complexity without needing someone else to make every important decision.
The goal, therefore, should not be to transfer a career from one person to another as though experience were a blueprint. A mentor can share what worked, what failed, what they would do differently, and which warning signs they have learned to recognize. They can challenge assumptions and sometimes argue passionately that a particular path carries risks the mentee may be underestimating. What they cannot do is remove uncertainty from someone else’s future, because their own experience was shaped by circumstances that will never be recreated exactly. Mentorship becomes most valuable when experience expands the mentee’s understanding of their options while still leaving them responsible for choosing the life and career they actually want.
Actionable Steps
- Present your experience as relevant evidence rather than proof that the mentee should reproduce your decisions.
- Ask about goals, constraints, risk tolerance, and personal circumstances before recommending major career or business decisions.
- Revisit older advice periodically to ensure that changes in technology, markets, funding, and industry structure have not made it outdated.
- Use questions to strengthen the mentee’s decision-making process instead of immediately prescribing an answer.
- Consider it a positive outcome when a mentee uses your perspective to reach a thoughtful decision that differs from the one you would have made.
Experience Does Not Mean You Know Everything
One of the easiest traps to fall into after spending decades in an industry is believing that experience has eventually provided an answer for everything. The longer we work, the more situations we have encountered, mistakes we have survived, successes we have participated in, and patterns we have learned to recognize. That experience is valuable, and there would be little purpose in mentorship if experienced people were unwilling to share what they have learned. At the same time, experience can create its own blind spots because familiarity makes our judgement feel increasingly reliable. The danger is not having confidence in what we know. The danger begins when confidence makes us less curious about what we might not know.
I have been working in the video game industry for more than twenty-five years, and there are areas where I can draw upon a considerable amount of practical experience. There are also areas where someone with five years in the industry knows substantially more than I do because they have spent those five years immersed in a discipline, technology, market, or community that I have never worked in directly. Pretending otherwise would not make me a more impressive mentor. It would simply make the advice less reliable. Part of becoming genuinely experienced is developing a better understanding of where the boundaries of your experience actually are.
Those boundaries matter because mentees often assume mentors know more than they do. If someone has been introduced as an industry expert, accelerator mentor, successful founder, executive, or veteran developer, there is a natural tendency to give their opinions additional weight. The mentor may offer an educated guess and assume everyone understands it as speculation, while the mentee interprets the same statement as an authoritative judgement based on decades of experience. That difference places additional responsibility on the mentor to distinguish clearly between knowledge, experience, opinion, and uncertainty. Saying that something is outside your expertise can protect a mentee from making a poor decision based on confidence you never intended them to infer.
I think this is particularly important because our industry changes so quickly. Someone can possess tremendous expertise while still carrying assumptions formed under market conditions that no longer exist. The way publishers evaluated projects fifteen years ago is not identical to how publishing works today. Player acquisition, platform discovery, crowdfunding, subscriptions, remote development, outsourcing, artificial intelligence, creator marketing, and countless other parts of the business continue to evolve. Experience can help us understand how industries respond to change, but it does not grant immunity from becoming outdated. Mentors need to remain active learners if they expect their advice to remain useful.
There is also a tendency for successful professionals to remember the decisions that contributed to their success more clearly than the circumstances that made those decisions possible. We may remember taking a particular risk and being rewarded for it without giving equal weight to timing, market conditions, personal relationships, financial security, or simple luck. We can then tell a mentee that they need to be similarly bold without recognizing that the consequences of failure may be entirely different for them. Experience becomes more useful when we examine it critically rather than presenting our careers as controlled experiments that prove which decisions produce success. Most careers are considerably messier than they appear when condensed into stories years later.
Failure deserves the same scrutiny because mentors can become overly influenced by things that went badly for them. If a partnership damaged one of our projects, we may become excessively suspicious of similar partnerships. If an investor relationship became difficult, we may discourage outside investment more strongly than the evidence warrants. If scaling a team created painful organizational problems, we may advise another founder to remain small even when their circumstances support growth. Lessons from failure are incredibly valuable, but they still require context. A mentor should help someone understand why something failed rather than assuming the category itself was the mistake.
This is why “I don’t know” is one of the most important things a mentor can become comfortable saying. I do not see it as an admission that someone lacks value or experience. In many situations, it demonstrates enough experience to recognize when another person’s expertise would be more useful. If a mentee asks me a detailed legal, financial, technical, or market-specific question that falls outside what I genuinely understand, the responsible response may be to help them find someone who knows that subject better. Mentorship should never become a competition to remain the most knowledgeable person in every conversation.
Referring someone elsewhere can actually strengthen the mentoring relationship because it demonstrates that the objective is helping the mentee find the best answer rather than protecting the mentor’s status. Over a long career, one of the most useful assets we accumulate is not simply knowledge but an understanding of who possesses knowledge we do not. Knowing when to make an introduction, recommend another expert, or encourage someone to seek specialist advice can be every bit as valuable as answering the question yourself. A mentor does not need to become the source of every solution. They need to care enough about the outcome to help the mentee find the right source when necessary.
Actionable Steps
- Clearly distinguish between advice based on direct experience, informed opinion, and areas where you are genuinely uncertain.
- Regularly challenge whether lessons from earlier stages of your career still apply under current industry conditions.
- Examine both successes and failures for contextual factors before turning them into general advice.
- Become comfortable saying that you do not know when a question falls outside your expertise.
- Use your network to connect mentees with people who understand a problem better than you do rather than attempting to remain the authority on everything.
Your Stories Should Serve the Mentee, Not Your Ego
Personal stories are one of the most useful tools a mentor possesses because abstract advice becomes easier to understand when someone can see how a similar situation unfolded in practice. If I tell a founder that rapid growth can create organizational problems, that statement has limited value by itself. Explaining what happened when a team expanded faster than its leadership structures, communication practices, or production systems could support provides much more useful context. The mentee can examine the circumstances, understand the consequences, and decide which parts resemble their own situation. Experience becomes tangible when it is attached to examples rather than presented only as general wisdom.
The problem arises when storytelling stops serving the lesson and starts serving the storyteller. Anyone who has spent a long time in the games industry accumulates stories involving recognizable companies, major projects, talented people, difficult situations, and unusual opportunities. Those stories can be entertaining, and there is nothing wrong with enjoying the experiences a career has provided. However, mentors need to notice when examples repeatedly become opportunities to remind the mentee which companies they worked for, how senior they were, which famous people they know, or how important the projects were. The relevant question is whether those details help someone understand the problem or simply establish the mentor’s status.
This can happen without malicious intent because professional experience becomes part of how we explain the world. When someone asks about building a team, I naturally think about teams I have built or managed. When someone asks about publishers, I think about experiences I have had with publishers. The difficulty is that repeatedly framing conversations around our own accomplishments can gradually make mentorship feel like an audience relationship rather than a developmental one. The mentee spends more time listening to the mentor’s career than examining their own circumstances, and the person who was supposed to be receiving support slowly becomes the person providing attention.
Being braggadocious is particularly counterproductive in mentorship because the person sitting across from you may already feel insecure about the difference in experience between you. A first-time founder struggling to raise money does not necessarily benefit from repeatedly hearing how easily an established executive once secured resources, assembled teams, or gained access to major companies. Even when those stories are factually relevant, the way they are framed matters. A useful story exposes uncertainty, mistakes, compromises, and lessons alongside whatever success eventually occurred. Sanitized stories in which the mentor consistently appears clever, decisive, and correct may strengthen the mentor’s image while teaching surprisingly little.
I think mentors also need to become comfortable with silence because experience creates a powerful temptation to fill every gap with advice. Sometimes a mentee needs enough space to explain the problem fully before anyone attempts to solve it. Sometimes they are thinking through an issue aloud and will reach an important realization if the mentor resists interrupting with the answer. Listening also reveals information that would never emerge if the mentor spends most of the session speaking. The quality of mentorship often depends as much on the questions we ask and the attention we give to the answers as it does on the experience we eventually share.
Listening becomes even more important when the mentee possesses knowledge the mentor does not. Someone entering the industry today may understand emerging communities, technologies, platforms, creative trends, or player behaviours far better than someone whose formative professional experiences occurred decades earlier. A younger developer may have worked directly with tools I have only encountered at a strategic level. A founder operating in another region may understand their local investment environment better than any international mentor ever could. Respecting that expertise prevents the mentoring relationship from becoming artificially hierarchical and allows both people to contribute where their knowledge is strongest.
Some of my favourite mentoring conversations are the ones where I leave having changed my own opinion about something. Those moments remind me that experience should create curiosity rather than eliminate it. If decades in an industry make someone less willing to reconsider their assumptions, those decades can eventually become a disadvantage because the mentor begins defending a historical understanding of the business rather than engaging with the one that exists today. Mentees provide an opportunity to encounter perspectives that may not appear naturally within our usual professional circles. A mentor who remains open to that exchange becomes more useful precisely because their knowledge continues evolving.
Personal experience should therefore function as a library rather than a stage. The mentor can pull out the story that helps illuminate a particular challenge, explain what happened, acknowledge what they misunderstood at the time, and then return attention to the person whose problem actually needs solving. Some conversations will require several examples, while others may require none. The value of the story is determined by what the mentee can do with it afterward, not by how impressive it makes the mentor appear. When experience is offered with that kind of restraint, it becomes one of mentorship’s most powerful resources.
Actionable Steps
- Before sharing a personal story, consider which part of it directly helps the mentee understand their current challenge.
- Remove unnecessary name-dropping, status markers, and accomplishments when they do not contribute to the lesson.
- Include mistakes, uncertainty, and context when discussing your successes so the mentee receives a realistic account of what happened.
- Leave enough space in mentoring conversations for the mentee to think, explain, and occasionally reach conclusions without your intervention.
- Remain curious about the mentee’s expertise and allow their knowledge to challenge your own assumptions.
Final Thoughts: The Reward Is Watching Someone Grow
One of the things I appreciate most about mentorship is that its rewards become clearer the longer you do it. Early in a career, professional satisfaction often comes from your own achievements. You remember the project that shipped successfully, the promotion you worked toward, the team you helped build, or the difficult problem you finally solved. Those accomplishments remain meaningful, but over time another kind of satisfaction begins to emerge. Seeing someone you have supported develop confidence, overcome a challenge, build a healthier team, or achieve something they once doubted they could accomplish can become every bit as rewarding as the milestones carrying your own name.
That satisfaction is particularly meaningful when you remember how uncertain professional development actually feels while you are experiencing it. Looking backward, careers can appear surprisingly orderly because we naturally connect events into a coherent story. While living through them, however, we rarely know which opportunity will matter, whether a difficult decision will prove correct, or whether the problem occupying our attention today will still seem important five years from now. A good mentor cannot remove that uncertainty, nor should they attempt to. What they can provide is perspective from someone who has survived enough uncertainty to help another person examine their options without becoming overwhelmed by them.
Some of the most valuable mentoring moments will involve helping someone avoid a mistake you made yourself, but I do not think that should become the objective of every relationship. There are lessons people sometimes need to learn through experience because understanding the theory is different from living with the consequences of a decision. Mentors can identify risks and share what happened when they encountered something similar, but attempting to eliminate every possible mistake can easily become another form of control. Development requires enough freedom for people to test their judgement, discover where it fails, and build confidence from recovering when things do not go according to plan.
This is also why I think successful mentorship should gradually reduce dependency rather than increase it. In the beginning, a mentee may bring almost every major decision into mentoring conversations because they are still developing confidence in an unfamiliar area. Over time, those conversations should change. Instead of asking what they should do, they may arrive having already evaluated several options and wanting another perspective before making the final decision. Eventually, they may simply tell you what they decided and explain the reasoning behind it, sometimes reaching a conclusion entirely different from the one you would have chosen.
A mentor should be pleased when that happens because independence is evidence that the relationship has accomplished something meaningful. If someone requires your approval before every important decision after years of mentorship, it is worth asking whether you have actually developed their judgement or simply made yourself central to their decision-making process. There can be a subtle ego reward in being needed, particularly when someone regularly seeks your opinion and treats it with considerable respect. Responsible mentorship requires resisting that reward when it begins interfering with the other person’s independence. The goal should be greater capability, not permanent reliance.
There is an equally important moment when a mentee begins challenging the mentor. Perhaps they have information you did not possess, experience you have never encountered, or simply a different interpretation of the same evidence. If the relationship has been healthy, disagreement should not feel like disrespect. It should create an opportunity to examine both perspectives and perhaps discover that the mentee has reached a better answer. Watching someone move from asking what you think to confidently explaining why they think you are wrong can be one of the clearest signs that they have developed the judgement mentorship was supposed to encourage.
Mentoring also creates a responsibility to protect people while they are developing that confidence. This does not mean shielding them from criticism, failure, or difficult realities. It means remembering that someone trusted you with uncertainty and treating that trust carefully. Their mistakes should not become stories you casually share to entertain other people. Their vulnerabilities should not become leverage for selling them something. Their struggles should not become opportunities for you to demonstrate your superiority, and their successes should not automatically become evidence for your personal brand. The mentoring relationship deserves discretion because trust is what makes the difficult conversations possible in the first place.
After enough years in an industry, I think there is something healthy about recognizing that the next generation does not need to reproduce our careers. They will inherit different technologies, different markets, different cultural expectations, and problems we cannot yet anticipate. Our experience can help them understand how previous generations approached difficult situations, which mistakes repeatedly appear in different forms, and which leadership principles seem to survive changing circumstances. What we should not expect is for them to accept all of our assumptions simply because we arrived earlier. An industry develops when experience is transferred without demanding obedience in return.
The mentors I respect most are therefore not necessarily the people with the most impressive résumés or the strongest opinions. They are the people who understand the weight their experience carries while remaining curious enough to know its limitations. They can tell someone that an idea is not working without making that person feel foolish for trying it. They can share decades of knowledge without making every conversation about themselves, and they can acknowledge when someone else understands a problem better than they do. Most importantly, they recognize that mentorship is an opportunity to contribute to another person’s growth without needing to own what that person eventually becomes.
For me, that is where the reward of mentorship ultimately sits. Someone may take a piece of advice, combine it with lessons from other people, challenge parts of it, discard what does not apply, and eventually develop an approach I would never have created myself. Years later, they may barely remember which ideas came from which conversation because those lessons have become part of their own experience. I do not see that as diminishing the mentor’s contribution. It means the guidance has stopped belonging to the mentor and has become useful to the person it was intended to help, which is exactly where it should have been heading all along.
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