Program Builder: Peer Mentoring Edition

Program Builder is a 122-card deck for designing a workplace peer mentoring program. Across three stages, you sort research-backed strategy cards with a simple yes, no, maybe mechanic, one decision at a time: why your program exists, how you'll measure success, who needs to support it, and the shape of the pilot you'll launch.

You finish with a curated stack of cards capturing every decision you made — the outline of your peer mentoring playbook.

Program Builder is Stephanie Schuhmacher's capstone project for Northwestern University's MS in Information Design and Strategy, and it came out of her research into peer mentoring programs. That research kept surfacing the same finding: peer mentoring requires a fundamentally different design approach than traditional mentoring, and most organizations either borrow a model that wasn't built for it or start from scratch every time.

The deck turns what the research says works into something you can put on a table and sort.

Stephanie Schuhmacher is a learning architect who came to L&D through UX: start with the person, not the curriculum, and measure outcomes rather than checkboxes. Her work centers on peer mentoring, capability building, and change enablement, and Program Builder brings those threads together with her graduate research at Northwestern. More about her work is at winnermint.com.