Ward
Vuillemot

Technologist & Technology Leader

RealSelf

RealSelf

Joined at a time of dramatic traffic loss, arresting decline and clawing back much of the lost traffic through an entire site-wide re-design to apply best-in-class SEO inclusive of information architecture, DOM redesign, page performance, and improve page SEO density by massive reduction of long-tail low-equity pages.

Owned the entirety of the consumer-facing experience inclusive of technology (engineering, IT, analytics & data science), product & UX, consumer marketing, and customer support. Led globally distributed team of nearly 150 people across US, South America, and Europe with a mix of both onshore and nearshore full-time and long-term embedded contractors.

RealSelf
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

Linkedin-in Envelope Youtube Github
Learn More
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.

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.

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 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 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.