Ward
Vuillemot

Technologist & Technology Leader

Hello, I am
WARD VUILLEMOT

I am many things. I’m a technologist and technology leader.  I’m also autistic, an artist, and a photographer.  

But mostly, I’m just Ward.

Technical Advisor & Technology Executive

I bring heart to technology

I’ve been working as a technology leader for over two decades for companies including Boeing, Amazon, Microsoft, Varsity Tutors, and now RealSelf amongst others.

Since 2015, I’ve worked remotely as a technology executive from central Washington state.

I’m a technologist in the broadest sense. I’ve worked nearly every job within my organizations from data scientist to software developer to UX designer to product manager and aerospace engineer.

My focus as a leader is to create high-performing teams through a culture deeply rooted in understanding the psychological factors that yield results.  In a word: psychological safety.  I empower my people to step into the unknown, feel encouraged to fail, and through this process learn.

It’s a continual process that produces exponential results and innovation.

Explore my philosophies

On Leadership

I often quip that the "T" in CTO stands for therapy, not technology; in so much that much of my responsibility is to promote collaboration amongst everyone in my organization and throughout the company.

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On Leading Remotely

Since 2015 I worked remotely as a technology leader. In that time I've built teams from scratch to growing them to span the globe with 100s of people.

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On Lean Thinking

I've a lifetime starting with my father learning about lean. I've worked as a Japanese interpreter with Shingijutsu, world leaders in lean consulting. And I've an early adopter of the agile manifesto. I know lean.

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On Technology

I have experience spanning multiple industry sectors from aerospace to retail to entertainment to education and now medical, which gives me a very broad view of adopting technology.

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On Building Scale

I've worked on every scale of growth from idea generation to scrappy startup right up to world-class enterprise, providing a unique vantage on how not only address each stage of growth, but navigate the transitions.

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Testimonials

As a technical and leadership advisor to Allakando, Ward is always super honest in his opinions and he is always pushing for what's best for the company. He is amazing at both the high-level strategic questions as well as the important details in our work. On a personal level it's also an absolute joy to work with Ward and I can't recommend him enough!
Fredrik Fridlund
Fredrik FridlundCo-founder & CEO of Allakando
Ward, is a natural leader who goes out of his way to help. When you meet Ward you’ll quickly realize he knows his stuff from product and technical strategy through to leading and growing people. You’ll learn a lot from him!
Jack Pratten
Jack PrattenCo-founder & CEO of Respondent.io
Ward has been a fantastic leader, mentor, and friend. He embodies the servant-leadership principles and leads with love. Ward believes in empowering teams to move quickly, to make mistakes, and to learn from (and celebrate!) those mistakes. Utilizing his deep wells of technical, product, and leadership experience, he is able to support any team or leader to achieve greatness. Ward is an excellent coach and mentor, providing kindly-candid, and thoughtful feedback. I have become a better leader thanks to my experience working with Ward -- I consider myself truly lucky to have worked with him.
Ian Turner
Ian TurnerHead of Engineering of Respondent.io
Wicked smart, collaborative, engaging, thoughtful, authentic, always delivers --- that's Ward. His combination of expertise (the "what") and leadership style (the "how") is truly remarkable and I saw it in action every day at RealSelf. He will make your organization and products better for customers (internal and external). Run - don't walk, to work with him.
Judy Stern
Judy SternCMO, Board Advisor. Ex-Amazon, eBay, Nordstrom, RealSelf
I have worked with Ward at 3 companies, we have worked together as peers and he was also my direct report at RealSelf. Ward is one of the smartest humans I have ever met. From a work perspective, he is an expert architect, a great engineer and a fantastic people leader. I have seen him break apart monolithic infrastructure into SOA, and I have seen him completely rebuild teams from the ground up to. I would gladly recommend him.
James Coyle
James CoyleCDO at KAR Global, formerally CEO at RealSelf, CCO at Nerdy
I have great respect for Ward not only as a technology leader, but as a people leader. He cares fully about each and every member of his team and anyone he comes in contact with for that matter. Ward feels strongly about making available information that can successfully set people on their journey. Ward not only builds strong teams within the organizations he works for, he helps connect good people with the companies that he feels are a match as he believes in everyone being in the right place. I have partnered on many people-based projects with Ward and, even though I have been doing this for a long time, I learned a ton from our partnerships. Ward continually strives to be the best person he can and never stops learning and growing.
Craig Meadows-Stein
Craig Meadows-SteinVP of People at Bittrex
Ward is someone who makes me think in new ways. Ward is someone with whom I enjoy sharing time. In my time working at Varsity Tutors with Ward, I learned the importance of being authentic, open, and vulnerable. Ward made every meeting better. Ward made every person better. While the great divide of a continent and very different industries now separate us, I look forward to continuing to learn from Ward and hope we one day are able to share a meal and drink.
Kevin Gaugush
Kevin GaugushSenior HR Executive: Capability Builder; Capacity Grower; Culture Enhancer; Trusted Adviser
Ward's one of the unicorns in the executive technology ranks leading from a place of empathy and compassion with great talent as a technologist and forward thinker. He's self-aware, humble but confident, a people first leader, and has great emotional intelligence that he applies to complex business situations. Anyone who brings Ward in as a board member, technical advisor or senior leader will be better off for it, raising their collective consciousness of their organization as a result.
Janis Machala
Janis MachalaExecutive Coach
Areas of Expertise

How I Advise

Product Strategy

Establish critical path for strategic product-market fit

Customer Experience

Working back from the customer, ensure unmet needs are satisfied

Technical Architecture

Facilitate multi-year vision to scale from scrappy monolithic system to enterprise-grade services-oriented archiecture

People Development

From recruiting pipeline to organization development to career leveling and calibration, I help you create a culture that people crave

I’m available for both short-term and longer-term engagements.

I currently consult with a broad spectrum of companies from pre-raise straight through Series-raise and beyond.

Engagements include cooperating with the CEO and head of engineering or product to advise on technology roadmap, strategic product roadmap, organizational development, and infrastructure and architecture.

Contact me now

My Focus

Technology is more than technology itself.  Technology is fundamentally about solving human problems.  Without our solutions being deeply rooted in the people who create and maintain it, we will fail to innovate.

Leadership

RESULTS THAT MATTER 100%
Culture FIRST 95%
Psychological Safety 90%
Growth MINDSET 95%
RECRUITING & RETENTION 80%

Technology

SERVICES ORIENTED ARCHITECTURE (SOA)
CLOUD-BASED SERVICES (AWS, GCP, Azure)
CONTINUOUS INTEGRATION & DEPLOYMENT (CI/CD)
SOFTWARE DEV LIFECYCLE (SDLC)
ShiftHealth AI
AI-powered coach leveraging best-in-class LLM and agentic workflows.
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RealSelf
Dramatic traffic turnaround on aggressive decline through sitewide SEO-focussed redesign.
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Varsity Tutors
We went from 50M to 125M in revenue and a fully-online learning experience on our own platform in 3 years. We did this while transforming Engineering to world-class, enterprise-grade scale
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Sears Home Services
As head of engineering, I recruited and hired our engineering organization; growing from just myself to 30 souls in twelve months.
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Xbox One
I spear-headed the cloud-based console experience that powers all of Xbox One barring only a few services. From the home screen, to pinned favorites, to the online store; Xbox consumers interact: it’s all powered by these services.
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Amazon
I launched AmazonTote, a pilot program in Seattle, in a matter of months. I was one of the original senior software engineers involved with AmazonFresh while it was still a pilot-program in the greater Seattle area. I received 4 patents during my tenure on the program.
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Boeing
I was the brain-child of a new generation of software to help analyze all flight regimes of Boeing airplanes to support long-standing regulatory requirements of airlines.
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Nell Derick Debevoise interviewed me in 2021 as part of her research for her recently released book Going First: Your Invitation to Find the Courage to Lead Purposefully and Inspire Action which is now available for purchase on Amazon.

ward@wardvuillemot.com

+1 206 661 2928

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On Leadership

I often quip that the “T” in CTO stands for therapy, not technology; in so much that much of my responsibility is to promote collaboration amongst everyone in my organization and throughout the company. It’s absolutely imperative I stay heart-centered and in the moment to ensure I’m able to provide necessary feedback, wanted or otherwise, in a manner that can be heard. My goal is not to be nice — everyone should be nice — but to be kind; in short: tell the truth, as I see it, to help ensure everyone is set up for success.

In this regard, I’ve become an ardent student of human psychology in order to get the most of our my teams. While I buttress my actions in a practical understanding of Maslow’s hierarchy as well as psychological safety, I ground myself with applied mechanisms and processes that can be whole-cloth used by any leader within my organizations. This kind of psychological safety creates space for individuals to hone their skills of self-awareness and self-actualization. Only in this way can any of us expect to realize our highest self, and this is why I consider my calling to be heart-centered leadership.

It’s common-sensical to create this kind of place to work as it brings out the best in everyone. And that is ultimately my goal as a leader: foster high-performing teams.

Listen to the last 10 minutes of Fullstack Leader podcast to get my top 5+1 recommendations to being an effective leader.

The first 30 minutes we cover a wide range of topics spanning psychological safety and emotional intelligence to delivering results to building remote-first cultures. We also touched on me being autistic and the implications for people leadership. 

Listen to the last 8-10 minutes of What Fuels You podcast as I speak on my leadership philosophy.

Nell Derick Debevoise interviewed me for her upcoming book on Going First: Find the Courage to Lead Purposefully and Inspire Action. We spent about an hour having a conversation about leadership philosophy, how we create sustainable, durable processes for high-performing teams, and discuss the importance of being authentic as a leader.

While IQ opens doors, EQ is what gets you through them. This is the cornerstone thought to how to I recruit and retain my teams. This article presents 6 attributes I consider must-haves when I’m recruiting folks to my teams.

In over two decades within Technology, I think we too often disassociate ourselves from each other in ways that harm not only ourselves but also our ability to create sustainable innovation. In this article, I talk about a different way up that mountain that asks each of us to have the courage to be ourselves at work.

Nell Derick Debevoise interviewed me for a Forbes article on my variant of COEs, or celebration of errors. COE are a straight-forward mechanism that takes the classic root-cause analysis to create psychological safety, engendering a culture of learning through failure. Read the article to learn how to apply this today!

Leading the RealSelf Way is a passion project that I spearheaded in 2021 at RealSelf. This is about 8 hours of video introduction that helps set expectations of all new people leaders at our company, whether recently promoted or hired.

This is very much a work-in-progress on a book I’m writing on practical advice for technology leaders. If you are interested in being involved as an early-drafter reader, please reach out to me.

On Leading Remotely

I’ve been fortunate to make a career as a technology executive since 2015 while working entirely from our home in central Washington. As an autistic person, I’ve found that remote work is an absolutely critical ingredient to help me maintain composure for my people. It’s not that I cannot work effectively in-person as I did at companies such as Boeing, Amazon, and Microsoft; but working remotely makes me more effective.

At RealSelf and other companies, I’ve helped transition companies to 100% remote-first.

Article I wrote for GeekWire in response some of the backlash to remote work. While remote work is not a panacea, I’ve developed some very practical tips that any can use to find their mojo in a remote world.

I wrote this a few months into the COVID-19 pandemic to share my many years of experience working 100% remotely as a technology executive. At the time, everyone was new to remote working and struggling to find their stride.

I wrote this as a companion piece on how to create culture when everyone is working remotely. Maybe not too surprisingly, creating culture in a remote-first environment is not different than in-person, albeit you need to be very conscious of everything you do.

On Lean Thinking

As an engineer and operations manager his entire career, my father was deeply involved in TQM (Total Quality Management). I recall quite vividly and fondly him sharing his thoughts, experiences, and even reading material with me in my very formative years as a pre-teen and teenager. In particular, I recall our discussions on Theory X versus Theory Z, which have played heavily on my leadership philosophy (see above).

Many years later I would work as technical Japanese interpreter at Boeing, working alongside Shingijutsu USA consultants to help mature the Boeing Production System, a variant of Toyota Production System. That year of intense working relationship with our Japanese consultants rekindled in me a passion for lean thinking. After a year as an interpreter, I returned back to engineering, transitioning from aerospace to software engineering where I introduced the very nascent, barely formed ideas of agile programming to Boeing.

Ever since then, I’ve been deeply involved in both working within and creating lean environments and processes. I worked as a senior software engineer in a paired programming environment to launch AmazonFresh. When I was technical program manager overseeing Amazon’s detail pages I reduced our deployment cycle time from 4- to 2-weeks and then to 1-week. I’ve worked inside an Azure incubation team consulting with TechStar’s Andy Sack where I created a dummy company and walked the local shopping mall to interview parents just to garner market signal on possible product ideas. I’ve created entire teams, services, and processes from 0 to 30 people in under a year for Sears, to growing the technology maturity of Varsity Tutors and RealSelf to 100s of technologists all while ensuring my teams deploy multiple times a day.

Lean is in my blood. I do not know any other way how to think or operate.

I chatted with Mark Graban about My Favorite Mistake.  Truth be told, I covered a few mistakes — what can I say?  I’m an overachiever — including from my time at Amazon working on AmazonTote and how there is such a thing as “too little UX friction” among other lessons I  learned from my mistakes.  

Also, here (again) about me and an ant and how that literally changed how I live my life.  Finally, we dig into psychological safety and how COEs (celebration of errors) help create it.

Lean Thinking According to Ward is a 1-hour video I recorded with members of my team at RealSelf sometime in 2020. If interested, you can also view the slides for this talk. 

Fate or Destiny, What Do You Choose? is an article I wrote on a 6-minute segment from my Lean Thinking video. It explores in more detail how our fate or destiny comes out of our ignorance, how we must all strive to throw back the veil, as it were, to decide which it will be.

On Technology

My academic engineering background spans multiple advanced engineering degrees from computational fluid dynamics and magneto hydrodynamics, technical Japanese with focus on Japanese space development, and software engineering.

My professional career pulls a thread from these in the loosest of ways, having focused on:

  1. E-Commerce :: At Amazon, I was part of the original engineering team that proved out AmazonFresh in the greater Seattle market. We built our own WMS (warehouse management system), and in the process of proving it out, it was possible to be unit-economic profitable. I subsequently launched AmazonTote, another pilot program in the greater Seattle market before taking over as technical program manager of Amazon’s RCX (Retail Customer Experience) where I oversaw Amazon’s detail product pages (lion’s share of all Amazon traffic).
  2. Multi-Sided Marketplaces :: From Amazon to Xbox to Sears to VarsityTutors to RealSelf, I’ve been deeply involved in nearly every aspect of supply-demand matching. Especially with the most recent experiences, I’m exceedingly well-versed with demand aggregation, whether through organic or paid traffic, along with applying data-at-scale to do demand-shaping to improve conversion yields.
  3. Services-based Marketplaces :: Not all marketplaces are created equal. Commodity-based marketplaces such as Amazon.com are trivially easy when compared to services-based marketplaces where there is large variability in supply quality, liquidity, et cetera.

On Building Scale

Every endeavor first starts with finding signal. Have we discovered an unmet need? Have we created a customer experience that addresses this unmet need? And have we convinced our customers that our experience is the best on the market? Once we have signal, it’s critical we rapidly scale every aspect of the company.

Unfortunately, the attributes that help discover signal are often in conflict with those required to scale. In my over twenty-years I’ve spanned both signal and scale. I’m uniquely positioned to help early-stage startups find signal, and once found then ensure they scale to enterprise-grade scale.

There are three areas where I’ve spent the past decade focused on building scale, or:

  1. Architectural Scaling :: Since my days at Sears, I’ve been the key technologist leading the charge to decouple monolithic systems, whether at enterprise- or startup-scale into modern, enterprise-grade cloud SOA (services-oriented architecture). This requires a significant amount of discipline and a multi-year roadmap that takes into account: 1) software development lifecycle; 2) process maturity; 3) operational maturity; and, 4) talent maturity.
  2. Organizational Scaling :: Technology is a deeply collaborative undertaking, requiring everyone to be open and engaged in working with each other. More so, even more important than reporting structure is our operating structure. This takes a great amount of finesse to intimately know my people, thus knowing how best to deploy them to the greatest effect. I’ve built teams from scratch and grown to 30 people in under 12 months, and taken teams of 30 and grown them to 150 at a global scale.
  3. People Development :: There is no greater resource than our people. If we are not investing in them, both for today and the proverbial tomorrow, we ultimately discover they will leave to grow their careers. I take seriously everyone’s career development. I’ve been deeply involved with the career leveling at Varsity Tutors and RealSelf, and consistently have significantly better retention than the industry averages.
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Found Elsewhere On The Web
Ward Vuillemot, Technologist

Ward Vuillemot

Technologist & Technology Leader

Phone

(206) 661-2928

Email

ward@wardvuillemot.com

Other Sites of Ward

Ward Vuillemot, Artist

Artist

Ward Vuillemot, Photographer

Photographer

On The Web

Whenever I’m given the chance I’ve spoken to others around the world (wide web) about my thoughts on leadership and technology.  I think it’s exceedingly important to be vocal about more holistic and effective means to being innovative.

I chatted with Mark Graban about My Favorite Mistake.  Truth be told, I covered a few mistakes — what can I say?  I’m an overachiever — including from my time at Amazon working on AmazonTote and how there is such a thing as “too little UX friction” among other lessons I  learned from my mistakes.  

Also, here (again) about me and an ant and how that literally changed how I live my life.  Finally, we dig into psychological safety and how COEs (celebration of errors) help create it.

Listen to the last 10 minutes of Fullstack Leader podcast to get my top 5+1 recommendations to being an effective leader.

The first 30 minutes we cover a wide range of topics spanning psychological safety and emotional intelligence to delivering results to building remote-first cultures. We also touched on me being autistic and the implications for people leadership. 

Nell Derick Debevoise interviewed me in 2021 as part of her research for her book Going First: Your Invitation to Find the Courage to Lead Purposefully and Inspire Action which is now available for purchase on Amazon.

Listen to the last 8-10 minutes of What Fuels You podcast as I speak on my leadership philosophy.

Nell Derick Debevoise interviewed me for a Forbes article on my variant of COEs, or celebration of errors. COE are a straight-forward mechanism that takes the classic root-cause analysis to create psychological safety, engendering a culture of learning through failure. Read the article to learn how to apply this today!

Nell Derick Debevoise interviewed me for a Forbes article on my variant of COEs, or celebration of errors. COE are a straight-forward mechanism that takes the classic root-cause analysis to create psychological safety, engendering a culture of learning through failure. Read the article to learn how to apply this today!

On Going First

Nell Derick Debevoise interviewed me in 2021 as part of her research for her book Going First: Your Invitation to Find the Courage to Lead Purposefully and Inspire Action which is now available for purchase on Amazon. 

At the core of her research is authenticity in leadership that connects ourselves and our work to the greater world around us.

Going First: Your Invitation to Find the Courage to Lead Purposefully and Inspire Action is a call to action to CEOs, as well as other executives, investors, and aspiring leaders, who want to have more impact, build their businesses, and leave a legacy. The book provides frameworks, tools, and inspiring examples of ways to connect our work to a larger sense of purpose. It dispels the myths and misconceptions about this approach to work as a force for good, using academic research and practical experience.

Going First explains the Spheres of Impact, Spectrum of Impact, and the Me-We-World framework to readers as a way to leverage the power of purpose to enhance their performance in work and life. The book provides a simple, step-by-step way to map the impact you have – and want to have more of – in your work and life. Going through the Spheres and Spectrum of Impact provides an Impact Dashboard, which is a critical step toward leveraging purpose to improve your wellbeing, performance, and life satisfaction.

The outcomes of leading and living purposefully fall into three dimensions – Me, We, and World. Specifically, in the Me dimension, leading purposefully has been shown to improve mental and physical health outcomes, including anxiety, depression, dementia, and heart disease. For teams and companies – the We dimension of the framework – purposeful leadership leads to higher levels of trust, from which engagement, productivity, and loyalty all follow. Finally, purposeful leaders connect their work to its impact on the world, improving Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) factors, that have become so important to investors, as well as consumers and employees.

Author Nell Derick Debevoise’s insights are a result of her studies at Harvard, Cambridge, Columbia and London Business Schools, as well as work with a diverse range of leaders on four continents in all sectors and a variety of industries and organization sizes and stages. The book is enriched by over 150 interviews with the CEOs and CHROs of companies ranging from Accenture to Goodwill, Benevity to Seventh Generation, and other corporates, startups, B Corps, and not-for-profits on the cutting edge of the movement toward a more inclusive, antiracist, and sustainable form of capitalism.

Nell Derick Debevoise interviewed me for her upcoming book on Going First: Find the Courage to Lead Purposefully and Inspire Action. We spent about an hour having a conversation about leadership philosophy, how we create sustainable, durable processes for high-performing teams, and discuss the importance of being authentic as a leader.