Design mentorship is where craft meets responsibility. As a UX Design Mentor for Lombakan, a full-cycle mentoring program preparing student teams for GEMASTIK 2026, I had the opportunity to guide six teams through the same journey that once earned my own team third place nationally with Leksin.

The role went beyond delivering slides. Across four structured online classes, I walked teams through the full arc of a competition-ready product: from user-centered ideation and problem framing, through journey mapping and information architecture, to high-fidelity prototyping and visual systems, and finally, pitch simulation under simulated jury pressure. Each session was built to challenge assumptions before introducing frameworks, teams had to sit with the discomfort of "what problem are we actually solving?" before they were handed any tool to solve it.

I paired every class with deck reviews and 1-on-1 sessions, giving teams direct, sometimes uncomfortable, feedback on their research depth, their storytelling, and the gaps between what they built and what they could defend. Watching teams like Zyvora and TanganPintar evolve from feature-first thinking to empathy-driven, evidence-backed design decisions was the clearest signal that the mentoring was working.

What stayed with me most was realizing, again, that GEMASTIK juries don't reward technological novelty. They reward teams who understand people deeply enough to make their problem, and their solution, believable. That's the lesson I tried to hand down to every team I mentored.