Sherpa Series 🧭, Volume 6: Effective Engineering Leadership

Twice monthly on Tuesdays, we profile an individual sharing a shoutout 📢 to a mentor or teammate who helped them in their early days of their career. Why Sherpas? 🧭 Sherpas are guides that help climbers ascend the world’s tallest peaks. ⛰

This week’s Sherpa Series is co-authored by Derek Parham, a close mentor and friend who has had an incredible career. Some highlights include serving as the founding engineer and tech lead for Google’s GSuite, as the Deputy CTO on the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, and now as the the CTO of JOOR.

Who was a teammate or a manager in the early days of your career that helped you become who you are today?

DP: Joe Ternasky, Engineering Director @ Google, Lead Engineer @ Google

What did they teach you?

DP: Joe really taught me many skills around being an effective engineering leader. In particular, he had wonderful skills to help me learn how to delegate early in my career which has helped out immensely

What qualities of theirs did you model after?

DP: Joe took a very behind the scenes approach to being an engineering director, which was very different than many folks at Google. He listened, tweaked, taught and generally moved things forward with mindfulness versus force

Are there any special moments that stand out when this person helped you?

DP: The big moment that stands out in my mind was the “delegation exercise” we’d do together during 1:1s. The exercise goes: Take everything that’s on your plate and one item at a time, run through asking the question: “If you weren’t here tomorrow, who could own this”. Really force yourself to think about everything you do during the week. By the end of this, you suddenly have a list of tasks that you can go delegate and people to hand off to. Usually it ended up that about half of the tasks were things I didn’t really have to own. His lesson was always “As a leader, do what only you are able to accomplish and delegate everything else. Never feel bad about delegation, it is important not just for you to free up mental space but it also levels up those on your team. It is an engineering leader’s job to think about everything that everyone else isn’t. No one else is at your level, seeing the things you do, able to put things together and act. Getting things off your plate, while sometimes seems counter-intuitive, is actually what is needed to see then make progress on those items.” This lesson I think applies to all leaders at a wide range of companies.

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Thank you to Derek for graciously sharing!

Please join in with #MentorGratitude 🙏 at any time by @calling an individual who helped YOU with a #shoutout.

Brian, Dan, Ken, & Tango 🥭