01 · Projects / Womentor
womentorWomen who have been there, one message away
This one started from my own experience: as a woman in tech, the technical problems are usually well documented. The harder ones — who to ask when you’re the only woman in the room, or how to even name what’s going wrong — usually aren’t.
Womentor is a free, private 1:1 mentoring platform. It aims to be first aid, not coaching — a way to get unstuck on one specific thing, fast, rather than a standing relationship. Instead of matching only by job title or seniority, it matches women by the specific thing they’re navigating — asking for a raise, being the only woman on the crew, a hostile work environment — or by industry itself, since fields like the trades and tech are still heavily male-dominated and that alone can be the reason to match. Either way, the two people land in a private room together.
- Role
- Sole designer & developer
- Timeline
- In development
- Status
- Deployed preview · mock data
- Platforms
- Web, mobile-responsive
02 · The problem
Mentoring platforms match the wrong axis
Most mentoring programs pair people by seniority or job title, and stop there. Industry is a real axis too — someone navigating a traditionally male-dominated trade needs a mentor who’s worked that specific field, not just any senior woman. But title and industry together still don’t cover everything: how to respond to being talked over in every meeting, or how to keep going when the environment itself is hostile, cuts across both. Those situations needed a third axis to match on.
The other gap is privacy. Advice forums and public communities are searchable, and that’s exactly wrong for a question like “how do I report my manager.” The design goal was a match made on the actual problem, in a room only the two people involved can see.
- Match on the challenge — or the industry. 42 named situations to choose from, ranked by overlap, or start straight from your industry — the right entry point when the field itself, like a traditionally male-dominated trade, is what a mentor needs to have lived.
- First aid, not coaching. Free, and scoped as a short conversation to get unstuck now — not a standing mentorship relationship.
- Private by default. No public feed, no profiles visible to anyone but the two people matched.
- Fast, not formal. A short message and an accept, not a weeks-long application process.
- One identity, both roles. The same person can be a mentee on one challenge and a mentor on another.
03 · How it’s built
Two views of the same product
Same stack and workflow as the ff-library, applied to a very different problem. Switch between what a member sees and what runs underneath.
Typography and tone
Fraunces carries the display headings, DM Sans carries the body copy, and JetBrains Mono handles the small uppercase labels — the same three-typeface split as this site, chosen so a serious subject doesn’t read as clinical. Light and dark themes are both first-class, not a dark-mode-as-afterthought toggle.
Mobile
The site is fully responsive today, and a private, one-message-at-a-time product like this is mostly going to get used on a phone — reaching for advice mid-crisis doesn’t wait for a desktop. The plan is to move to mobile-first as the layouts mature, rather than retrofitting a desktop-first design once usage confirms it.
Two ways in
You can start from a picker across 42 named situations — grouped into things like Pay & Negotiation, Bias & Culture, and Trades & Male-Dominated Fields — or start from your industry directly. Both feed the same ranked directory; which one you lead with just depends on whether the specific problem or the field itself is what matters most.
The mentor directory
Each card shows initials, title, years of experience, a short personal statement, three or four expertise tags, and a response-time estimate — deliberately no star rating or follower count. Sort options are Best match, Most experience, and Recently joined; filters narrow by topic, availability, industry, country, and language.
Sign-in
Email-only, passwordless: a magic link, nothing to remember and nothing posted publicly against an account. For a product where the whole point is discretion, one fewer credential tied to a real name felt like the right trade.
Matching, not searching
A member’s selected challenges — and, separately, her industry — are compared against each mentor’s tagged expertise and background, and the directory’s default sort ranks by that overlap. Industry is a primary match signal, not just a filter: someone in a traditionally male-dominated trade may care more about a mentor who’s worked that field than one who’s faced the exact same named challenge. Country and language stay as secondary filters.
Privacy as a database constraint
Conversations are private between exactly the two people matched into them. That’s enforced with Row Level Security rather than left to the UI to hide — the same reasoning as ff-library’s per-user notes: a bug in a query shouldn’t be able to leak someone else’s conversation.
Mock data ahead of real mentors
The directory currently runs on 40 seeded mentor profiles across 26 countries and 12 industries. The point of shipping it this way was to validate browsing, filtering, and matching end-to-end before recruiting real mentors — the harder, slower problem gets tackled once the product side is proven out.
04 · Design decisions
Choices that shaped the product
A few calls that pushed back against the default playbook for mentoring and community products.
Match on the situation, not the title
- Tension
- Most mentoring platforms sort by job title or seniority, which flattens very different lived experiences under one label.
- Choice
- A fixed taxonomy of 42 named challenges is one primary match input; industry is the other. Country and language stay as secondary filters.
- Result
- A mentee can lead with the specific problem or with the field itself, whichever actually explains what she needs.
Free, and scoped as first aid
- Tension
- Mentoring products often monetize through paid tiers or membership, and market themselves as an ongoing coaching relationship.
- Choice
- Womentor is free end to end, and explicitly framed as first aid — a short, focused exchange to get unstuck on one thing, not a coaching engagement.
- Result
- Removes the two biggest reasons someone might not ask: cost, and the fear of signing up for more than she wanted.
No public profiles or feed
- Tension
- Community products usually drive engagement with visible activity — profiles, badges, follower counts.
- Choice
- Every conversation stays private to its two participants. There is no feed, no public metrics, no leaderboard.
- Result
- The product optimizes for one hard conversation happening safely, not for time on site.
Passwordless sign-in
- Tension
- A password is another credential to manage, and reused passwords are how a supposedly private account gets linked back to a name elsewhere.
- Choice
- Sign-in is an emailed magic link. No password is stored.
- Result
- Fewer account-recovery dead ends, and one less credential tied to a sensitive account.
Ship the directory before the mentors
- Tension
- A mentoring marketplace only works once both sides exist, but nobody signs up to a directory of zero mentors.
- Choice
- The directory launched seeded with 40 representative mock profiles, so the browsing, filtering, and matching flows could be built and tested end-to-end.
- Result
- The riskier, slower problem — recruiting real mentors — comes next, onto a product that already works.
05 · Where it stands
Deployed, running on mock data
Womentor is live at womentor.vercel.app and browsable end-to-end — the challenge selector, mentor directory, and matching all work. It’s running on seeded mentor profiles while the harder, non-technical work of recruiting real mentors catches up.
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