How do we make time for mentorship without blowing the roadmap?

Budget 10–15% capacity up front in quarterly planning and hard‑cap feature WIP. Tie error budget policy to mentorship so reliability debt increases mentorship time, not feature work.

What if our senior folks don’t want to mentor?

Make it part of promotion criteria and performance expectations. Rotate stewards, measure outcomes, and celebrate wins in QBRs. If someone refuses to share knowledge, you have a risk management problem, not a coaching problem.

We’re fully remote and across time zones—does shadowing still work?

Yes. Use regionally paired rotations, recorded incident walkthroughs, and async PR office hours. Keep at least one overlapping hour for office hours.

How do we handle compliance and change freezes?

Run drills in staging during freezes, update runbooks and ADRs, and treat mentorship checklists as SOC2/ISO evidence. GRC will support it if you show reduced operational risk.

Is this just for ops/SRE?

No. Any team with high‑risk systems benefits: data platforms (`Airflow`, `dbt`), ML infra (`Ray`, `KServe`), or legacy monoliths. The rituals are the same—work on the real thing, measure outcomes.

Culture · Oct 1, 2025 · 9 minute read

The Mentorship Program That Stopped Our 2AM SEVs

How we transferred tribal knowledge without stalling roadmaps—concrete rituals, leadership behaviors, and metrics that hold up in enterprise reality.

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The Mentorship Program That Stopped Our 2AM SEVs

Key takeaways

Implementation checklist