Data updated: 2026-10-08
Engineering leadership mentoring, in numbers.
Everything here comes from Marian Kamenistak's own practice: 3,660 1:1 leadership sessions with 317 engineering leaders in 17+ countries since 2019. No survey panel and nothing scraped: these are session logs, session scores and session notes from a working mentoring practice in Central Europe.
Journalists, researchers, and fellow leaders: cite freely with attribution. The format is at the bottom of the page.
Key findings
- Career moves and negotiation was the top topic every year from 2024 to 2026 (tied with goals and OKRs in 2024), in 28% to 46% of tagged sessions.
- AI adoption came up in 44% of recorded 2026 sessions (19 of 43).
- Delivery and prioritisation fell from 25% of tagged sessions in 2024 to 5% in 2026.
- 52% of mentees are in their first leadership role when they start.
- Mentees score sessions 9.17 out of 10 on average, across 953 scored sessions since 2024.
The practice
- 3,660
- 1:1 leadership sessions since 2019
- 1,159
- logged mentoring sessions since June 2023
- 317
- engineering leaders mentored
- 17+
- countries the mentees lead teams in
- 74%
- of clients come from referrals
- 9.17/10
- average session score, 953 sessions since 2024 scored 0 to 10 by the mentee
- 9.2/10
- NPS across the mentoring practice
One session is one 1:1 hour. The 3,660 total adds 2,501 sessions from 2019 to May 2023 (internal 1:1s at Mews, ELH advisory, fractional-CTO work) to the 1,159 mentoring sessions logged since June 2023.
1:1 leadership sessions per year
The first bar is one total for 2019 to May 2023, kept before the mentoring log existed. From June 2023 each bar is logged mentoring sessions. 2026 runs to 8 October 2026.
See the numbers as a table
| Period | Sessions | Type |
|---|---|---|
| 2019 to May 2023 | 2,501 | Mews 1:1s, ELH advisory, fractional CTO |
| 2023 (from Jun) | 206 | Logged mentoring |
| 2024 | 379 | Logged mentoring |
| 2025 | 322 | Logged mentoring |
| 2026 (to date) | 252 | Logged mentoring |
| Total | 3,660 |
Who asks for mentoring
52% of mentees are in their first leadership role when they start. The seniority mix of the full mentee base since 2019, by role at the start of the engagement:
See the numbers as a table
| Mentee segment | Share of mentees |
|---|---|
| Line managers (EMs, team leads) | 27% |
| Mid-level leaders (senior EMs, heads of) | 23% |
| Product leaders (PMs, CPOs) | 20% |
| Top managers (VPs, CTOs, directors) | 20% |
| ICs moving into leadership | 10% |
A quarter of the demand is line managers, which is the number worth sitting with. The industry produces first-time engineering managers faster than it supports them, and the sessions show it. That gap is what EM-focused mentoring exists for.
What leaders bring to sessions, 2024 to 2026
Share of tagged sessions that touched each topic. One session can carry two topics, so a column adds up to more than 100%.
| Topic | 2024 n=59 | 2025 n=28 | 2026 (to date) n=55 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Career moves and negotiation | 28% | 46% | 41% |
| Goals, metrics and OKRs | 28% | 21% | 16% |
| Team structure and reorgs | 13% | 21% | 7% |
| Process and methodology | 15% | 14% | 10% |
| Managing up and stakeholders | 10% | 14% | 14% |
| Management vs Staff+ track | 10% | 10% | 18% |
| AI adoption | 0% | 0% | 36% |
| Delivery and prioritisation | 25% | 3% | 5% |
| The person behind the role | 6% | 14% | 10% |
| Hiring and team building | 11% | 14% | 3% |
| Culture and change management | 10% | 7% | 10% |
| Underperformance and hard conversations | 13% | 3% | 3% |
Only sessions with written notes or recordings are in the topic data: 59 of 379 sessions in 2024, 28 of 322 sessions in 2025, 55 of 252 sessions in 2026. 2024 and 2025 come from written notes. Most 2026 sessions come from recordings, which pick up side topics that short notes leave out, so read changes into 2026 with care. 2025 rests on 28 sessions.
Typical questions behind the topics
Team and people
The humans reporting to you.
- Boosting an underperformer instead of rotating them
- Team audit and roadmap to high performance
- Hiring the right person for the mission ahead
Delivery and org
Moving the machine without breaking it.
- Goals and KPIs that survive Q3
- Shipping 80%+ of the roadmap, consistently
- Prioritizing when every stakeholder wants everything
Career
Where the leader goes next.
- Negotiating promotion, salary, or bonus with receipts
- Management vs Staff+ track decision
- First 90 days as a first-time Staff, EM, or CTO
The human behind the role
What runs when the laptop closes.
- A daily routine that survives the calendar
- Imposter syndrome as a first-time leader
- Burnout recovery while keeping the job
Active mentees per month, last 12 months
The practice runs against a hard cap of 16 mentees in parallel. The last 12 full months, Oct '25 to Sep '26, ranged 11 to 16 active mentees a month, snapshot from the session log on 2026-10-08:
See the numbers as a table
| Month | Active mentees, of a cap of 16 |
|---|---|
| Oct '25 | 13 |
| Nov '25 | 13 |
| Dec '25 | 12 |
| Jan '26 | 16 |
| Feb '26 | 13 |
| Mar '26 | 11 |
| Apr '26 | 13 |
| May '26 | 13 |
| Jun '26 | 12 |
| Jul '26 | 13 |
| Aug '26 | 12 |
| Sep '26 | 14 |
Months above the cap happen when handovers overlap; the cap is why they stay rare. The same series renders live on the homepage, fed by the same log.
How fast results come
Most mentees hit their first big milestone in 4 to 6 sessions. At the usual cadence that is 2 to 3 months: a promotion case built, an underperformer turned around, a reorg landed without delivery dropping. The testimonials page has the receipts, the pricing page has the numbers.
The scene around the data
The dataset grows inside the Central European engineering leadership scene, not next to it. The Engineering Leaders Community, founded by the same mentor in 2019, runs 3,300+ members, 12 meetups a year with 120+ leaders in the room, and an annual conference with 350+ attendees and speakers from Netflix and Stripe. Its own numbers (members, meetups, the conference) are on the community statistics page.
Background behind the mentoring: 24 years in software, engineering org at Mews built through Series C from 8 to 80 teams, advisor to Manta (acquired by IBM), 35+ fractional CTO projects, and advised companies with a combined portfolio of $7.1bn.
Cite this data
Free to quote with attribution, CC BY 4.0. Suggested format:
Kamenistak, M. (2026). Engineering Leadership Mentoring Statistics 2026. marian.coach. https://www.marian.coach/engineering-leadership-statistics/
The yearly numbers on this page are also a CSV file. Need a cut of the data that isn't on this page, or a quote for an article? Write to marian@marian.coach. Answer within 48 hours.
Methodology
Session counts come from the public mentoring log, one row per month since June 2023 and cross-checked against the calendar, plus 2,501 earlier sessions kept as a single total because no per-year record of them exists. Every mentoring session is scored 0 to 10 by the mentee; the 9.17 average covers 953 sessions since 2024. The NPS comes from post-engagement reviews. Mentee segments are classified by role at the start of the engagement.
Topics: an AI model (claude-opus-5-5) tagged the written notes and recordings of 142 sessions against 12 fixed topics, up to two per session. A tag only counted when the model could quote the note word for word, and a manual check of 20 random tags found 2 borderline calls. Names, companies and quotes stay private because many sessions fall under client NDAs; only yearly totals are published. Numbers are rounded down, never up.
And if you read the 52% and recognized yourself: that first leadership role gets easier with someone who has sat in it. Start at pricing.