The Mentorship Deficit: Who trains the next generation when entry level hiring has stopped?

I was, by any reasonable measure, a terrible product person in my first year. I did not know how to write a requirements document. I could not read a P&L statement. I once presented a feature roadmap to a room of petroleum engineers that was so disconnected from their reality, one of them asked if I had ever seen an oil rig. I had not.

But I had Rajan.

Rajan was a senior product lead at the petroleum company who had no formal obligation to teach me anything. He was not my manager. There was no mentorship programme on a slide deck somewhere. He simply decided, for reasons I still do not fully understand, that he would invest his time in making me less useless. He dragged me to offshore platform visits. He made me sit with rig operators for entire shifts, watching them interact with the monitoring software we were supposedly building for them. He would review my product specs line by line, not to correct the formatting, but to challenge the thinking behind every decision.

That mentorship was informal, unpaid, and more valuable than every formal training programme I have attended since. Combined.

The Margins Have Been Eliminated

Here is the thing about mentorship that nobody wants to admit: it was always a side effect. Nobody is hired to mentor. That is the problem. Mentorship happens in the margins, and the margins have been eliminated.

When companies stopped hiring junior product managers, they did not just remove entry-level roles from their headcount. They removed the conditions under which mentorship naturally occurs. A senior PM with two junior reports teaches them things, not because it is in their OKRs, but because it is faster than watching them fail. But a senior PM surrounded entirely by other senior PMs has no reason to teach anyone anything. Everyone is supposed to already know.

The mentorship deficit is not a training problem. It is a structural one.

I advise a B2B startup where the entire product team consists of senior external hires. Every PM has eight to twelve years of experience. On paper, it is a dream team. In practice, it is a team of strangers who each brought their own playbook from their last company. Nobody mentors because everyone was hired to execute, not to develop others.

Last quarter, their most experienced PM left for a competitor. Reasonable enough. People leave. But what followed was six months of the remaining team rediscovering decisions, contexts, and customer relationships that had lived entirely inside that one person's head. There was no junior PM who had been shadowing her. There was no mid-level person she had been developing. The context debt, all that accumulated knowledge, simply vanished.

Six months of rebuilding what one junior PM sitting in meetings could have preserved.

Who Owes the Next Generation?

The people most vocal about the mentorship deficit are, with depressing consistency, the people who benefited most from mentorship themselves. I include myself in this group. The mentorship I received from Rajan at the petroleum company shaped how I think about product work to this day. Every time I insist on watching real users before designing, that is Rajan's voice in my head. Every time I push back on a roadmap built from assumptions instead of observation, that is a lesson from those offshore platform visits.

But here is the uncomfortable question: have I done the same for enough people coming behind me?

Honestly, not enough. And I suspect most senior product people, if they are being truthful, would say the same.

The mentorship deficit is not something happening to us. It is something we are doing.

When I was at Boeing, working on interfaces for maintenance crews who wore thick gloves and worked in dim hangars, the entire product culture was built on institutional knowledge transfer. The engineers who had spent decades in aviation did not hoard their expertise. They shared it constantly, often by pulling a younger colleague aside and saying, "Let me tell you why we do not design it that way." That knowledge transfer was not optional. In aviation, what you do not pass on can literally cause failures.

Product management does not have cockpit alarms when knowledge transfer breaks down. It has something quieter and harder to detect: a slow degradation of judgment across the organisation.

The Context Debt Compounds

The next generation of product leaders is not being developed. It is being skipped.

Think about what this means in three years. The mid-level product managers who would normally be stepping into leadership roles do not exist. Companies skipped that cohort entirely. So when current senior leaders move on (and they will), the bench is empty. The response will be to hire more senior externals. Who will arrive with no organisational context. Who will spend six months learning the domain. Who will build their own processes from scratch because nobody documented why the existing ones were built the way they were.

The context debt compounds. Every cycle of external-hire replacement adds a layer of lost institutional memory. And every layer makes the organisation a little more fragile, a little more dependent on individuals rather than systems.

I watch this pattern at three different companies I advise. It is the same story each time. Brilliant senior hires who are productive from week one on execution but take months to understand why certain product decisions were made. The "why" never got written down because the person who knew the "why" was too senior and too busy to document it, and there was no junior person around to absorb it through proximity.

Mentorship is not charity. It is how organisations maintain continuity. Without it, every departure is a minor amnesia event.

What Filling the Gap Actually Looks Like

This is not a call for companies to restart their graduate programmes out of altruism. The maths is simpler than that. One junior PM costs a fraction of a senior hire and, if developed properly, becomes a mid-level PM with deep organisational context in two years. That mid-level PM with context will outperform a newly hired senior PM without context on almost every internal decision. Not because they are smarter. Because they know where the bodies are buried.

But filling the mentorship deficit requires senior product people to accept a role they were not hired for. It means spending an hour a week with someone who asks questions you consider basic. It means letting a junior PM sit silently in a stakeholder meeting and then spending twenty minutes afterward explaining the subtext. It means treating knowledge transfer not as a nice-to-have but as part of your actual job.

The startup I advise eventually hired two junior PMs after losing that senior PM and her six months of context. The team lead told me it felt like a step backward. Two people who needed training, who slowed down meetings with questions, who required code reviews of their product specs. But four months later, when another senior PM went on extended leave, the transition was almost invisible. The junior PMs had absorbed enough context through proximity, through all those "basic" questions, through sitting in meetings and watching, to keep the work moving.

That is not a coincidence. That is the mentorship deficit being quietly, unglamoriously repaid.

Nobody will give you a promotion for mentoring a junior PM. Nobody will add "developed the next generation of product leaders" to your performance review. The return on mentorship is measured in years, not quarters, and most organisations have lost the patience for that kind of arithmetic.

But the arithmetic does not care about your patience. It runs whether you are counting or not.