The CIO Who Bet Her Job on Her Team and Won

Siobhan Fagan: What would you do if two days before starting a new role as CIO of a multi-billion dollar firm you noticed the company’s website was returning 404 errors? This happened to Julie Averill, just two days before officially starting as the CIO at Lululemon. Julie is a technology executive who’s lead massive digital transformations at some of retail’s most iconic brands including Nordstrom, REI and Lululemon. During her tenure at Lululemon, she helped the company scale from $2 billion to over $10 billion in revenue globally — so clearly that story had a happy ending.

More importantly for today’s conversation, Julie is the author of the book, “Chief Impact Officer,” and I can’t wait to dive into some of these stories.

Welcome to the podcast, Julie!

Julie Averill: Thank you so much. And I'll just say it's so cool to see you actually holding a physical copy of the book as we approach release. So thank you for reading it.

Siobhan: It's out in the wild! It will be released on June 16th, which is very exciting. There's a lot that I want to touch on in this book, so I'm going to jump in.

Systems Thinking Lessons From a Pro Baseball Catcher

Siobhan: I want to start with a couple of the themes that came up. One that played throughout was systems thinking and what systems thinking did for you throughout your career.

But you mentioned in the book that you didn't really get that while working through different jobs and stuff like that. You got this point of view from your dad who was a baseball catcher in the major leagues and how he looked out on the whole baseball field. Can you talk a little bit about systems thinking and how that informed your career?

Julie: First my dad. I come from a family of baseball. My grandfather's in the baseball hall of fame. My dad played in the majors for seven or eight years. So I grew up very much involved in baseball. My dad was the ultimate team player. He knew every person that he ever played with. He knew the calls that they made, who would hit under what circumstances. He had a very interesting view of baseball. He really saw all of the parts and how they worked together. He also saw the humans underneath them, the tendencies of the pitchers, the tendencies of every single batter under different situations. He studied the game and he saw it really as an engine.

So I grew up with him really teaching me that viewpoint of seeing not just the sum of the parts, but seeing the whole. And I didn't realize it at the time. My dad was dragging me to all of these baseball events, and my mom and I would do rock, paper, scissors for who had to go. Because it's just not cool when you're little.

But what I learned over time was that he taught me how to see things from the systems thinking viewpoint, which is it's not just how individuals are doing the thing that they're doing, but how it ladders up to the whole, and then how you can ultimately use that to predict things that are going to happen. So I appreciate that viewpoint, even though maybe I didn't when I was growing up.

Siobhan: Sort of came to you in the later years. It's funny because I never really thought of the catcher having that wide field of vision, literal wide field of vision. I loved that detail in the book. So that was a great place to start.

Why Authenticity Is a Leadership Skill, Not a Weakness

Siobhan: Another theme that comes up throughout the book — you were an executive at Nordstrom, you were a CIO at Lululemon, you were a CIO at REI, but you reach a point where you realize there's more to the job than just being really good at technology. I was hoping you could talk a little bit about when that realization came to you and how you used that moving forward.

Julie: I've always been that person that sits maybe halfway between the business and halfway in technology. So I've always been really guided by not just technology for technology's sake, but what is it doing to drive the business differently? So I talk about stories like the one that we had talked about Nordstrom when we turned Nordstrom into a true omnichannel retailer. It was just incredibly transformational to the business. It wasn't a technology. It was that the stores were seeing faster turn on their inventory, more customers were coming in, etc.

But specifically to your question about my leadership change, it was really about how I lead as a person. So this notion of it's not about the work as much as it is, it's not about the tasks, as much as it is about leading people and leading outcomes. I learned through that process of discovering myself, discovering how to be the leader that I wanted to be, that the most important thing is trust to me. It's establishing trust, and to do that, you have to be able to really represent yourself.

So I talk about authenticity not as a vulnerability, but as a skill. Because without having to think about who you should be and just be able to be yourself, you can be fully present. And I found that that unlock for me of being my true self has allowed me to reach heights that I never would have before if I was just thinking about who other people needed me to be, which is a natural tendency when you're a woman in a male-dominated field. I studied computer science a long time ago and tried to fit in. And then I went on the journey of trying to fit in to actually, what does it mean to stand out and stand for something?

The Conversation That Changed How Julie Averill Leads

Siobhan: I'm glad that you raised that because you write very candidly about hiding your true self and your family during years in corporate America. And it was a conversation with your mentor, Mike Richardson, who asked you the question, how are you going to get your team to follow you if they don't even know who you are? Can you talk a little bit about how dropping that armor and making yourself vulnerable in that way actually increased your influence at work?

Julie: That was a tough conversation. I thought I was going to him for advice on my strategy. This is right when I took the job at REI. And I had it all figured out. I'd always been really good at planning things, on navigating large, complicated initiatives. So I had a plan. And Mike's question back to me — we were having a beer at Red Robin. He heard everything I said. I came in full speed and he listened until I took a moment to breathe. And then he said that question: how are you going to get your team to follow you if they don't know the real you?

And I didn't even realize that anybody knew that. I didn't know that people realized that I was wearing these masks. As a gay woman, as a woman in technology that felt like I needed to pretend to be something that maybe wasn't core to me. So I tried to answer him differently. I tried to defer the question, but in genuine Mike style, he was patient and came back to it. And that was a moment for me where I realized that what I had been trying to do of pretending I was someone I wasn't, wasn't actually working.

So that started the journey of, what if this notion of vulnerability — that word scared me to death because the reason that I had the masks on was because I wasn't sure if it was safe. I think this is why I go to this notion of safety when I really think about leadership. I wasn't sure if it was safe. I wasn't out to my parents at the time. I didn't know what would happen if they found out. Meanwhile, you might think it's ridiculous because by this time, I had kids. My daughter was nearly two years old by the time that I finally had that conversation with my parents. And turns out, yes, they knew the whole time too.

So while I thought I was doing a great job of pretending and wearing all these masks, I really wasn't. But it had created what I felt like was this safety net, where I was not going to be judged by people, where I was not going to be told that maybe I wasn't enough, or that I wasn't right.

So this notion of vulnerability — I had to figure out how to make vulnerability an asset instead of something that made me feel weak. I went on a very deliberate journey of opening myself up. I got a coach that knew the real me, gave me the hard questions. And probably the one question that got me more than anything was about the example that I was setting for my team. That hit me hard. Because when you're wearing the masks and you're pretending, you think everybody's going along with you, but they're not. They're watching and they know too.

So that was the point when I realized that it wasn't working and I needed to figure out how to unlock the real Julie. And when I did over the course of time, I found that there was such support. By setting an example for others, I had people reach out to me and tell me how important it was that they had someone like me that they could identify with in the C-suite and what that gave them in terms of their own safety net.

Siobhan: I think also probably you were creating a second job for yourself by having to keep these walls up and doing the work of that while also doing amazing work in technology.

Julie: Totally. It's hard to do that. I didn't even know.

How Psychological Safety Drives Performance at Scale

Siobhan: This kind of brings me into — because you do talk a lot about trust and psychological safety and culture. Those aren't topics necessarily that people expect a CIO to be talking about. And we are going to talk about some of the very technical work that you did and that successfully pulled off. But I'm wondering, can you talk a little bit about what the reception was when you were prioritizing these things in your workplaces? And if people thought they were — a lot of times they get these reputations of being just soft things or gravy, whatever. Can you talk a bit about the reception to that?

Julie: Reception was fantastic because we were delivering at speed and at scale. I think of culture as this infrastructure, this foundation where if you have strong culture that allows people to be curious and allows them to lean in and allows them to ask questions and allows them to fail, then they are able to move fast.

Conversely, if you have a hierarchical organization that dictates how you should act and what you should do and what your everything is, then people operate from what's safe, which isn't the creative thinking. And you're not going to want to put in the extra effort because you believe really deeply in the future of the company or the direction or the project that you're on.

So creating this psychological safety, which was a key priority for myself and my leadership team, was that thing that I have seen in real time that enables innovation and scaling at speed. When I think about what took us from $2 billion to $10 billion over those five years, technology was an enabler for all of that. We built massive global technology. And the only way we were able to do that was by creating this incredible team that trusted each other enough to be able to reach across the aisle, to ask questions, ask for help, drive things together.

The reception — it wasn't like we said, okay, don't work on anything. We just want to make sure everybody feels safe. Not at all. This is about being able to be competitive and to be really aggressive in our goals because of the foundation that we have of the culture that enables people to fully be themselves, to act with safety, to take risks, and to be super honest.

I think sometimes there's this notion that you have to choose between performance and scale. And I would argue that they actually go together, that one requires a second. If you're going to have really tough conversations about performance, that's not something that you bottle up. You have those conversations in the moment. So transparency, honesty, integrity — all of those things enable innovation.

Siobhan: You had a line that I actually wrote down that was, psychological safety without standards is just comfort. Standards without safety creates fear. I thought that really summarized it for people who think this is soft. These are just the structures that you need to build in order for people to perform their best.

Betting on Her Team: The Lululemon Website Rebuild

Siobhan:  I want to talk about one specific moment at Lululemon. It was fairly early on in your career. And this is the foundation, I think, or how I read it, was the foundation of the team building, where you were building the new North American website for Lululemon. You came in and there was already a process fully going by the time you stepped into the CIO role, where they had brought in an outside consultant, had some plans, and you started talking to team members, and the team members — you started picking up on some hesitation, let's say, to understate it.

So you basically faced a choice between moving forward with this external vendor who had already been commissioned, and just allowing your team to build the solution that potentially wasn't the safe choice to make. And you chose to work with the internal team. Can you walk us through that decision process and tell us a little bit about the results?

Julie: I started on a Wednesday. The backstory is three days before I started, there was a 20-hour website outage. The technology team was not trusted at all within Lululemon. There was no detection. I was actually the one who found this. I was at home shopping and realized that the website was down. So there was no ownership in it. It was outsourced to a vendor.

I come in, I started on a Wednesday. Wednesday I met with the consultants, understood the plan that they had. They had all executive alignment, were just waiting for me to come in and engage the team to execute the plan. Thursday I went to our Portland office. I thought I was meeting one person. I ended up meeting a whole team that wasn't on the org chart, but they were phenomenal technologists and they had built a prototype of really what needed to be implemented. They were really excited about it — a cloud-based prototype. Prior to that, we were on-prem. Friday, I went to San Francisco, which is where the back-end team was.

By Monday, I called everyone in, including some folks in Vancouver. I hired a program manager who was a soccer mom that I knew was unemployed. I was, what are you doing? I don't even know if I can get you on the payroll, but I need help. So she came in and showed up on Monday and the consultants were there.

I realized that we were going to pick our future and either our future was going to be with the solution that the consultants had figured out and sold to the executives, or we were going to leverage this prototype that both the Canadian and the Portland teams had been working on kind of silently. I knew that I wanted the internal solution because I wanted the team to be able to own it going forward. I knew that that's where you get commitment. If I picked the consultant solution, it would be done to them.

But I also knew that this was potentially a career-limiting decision. I had not built my credibility in the organization yet. By the time this decision needed to be made, I was in there for about two weeks and about to tell the executives that everything they had been sold, I didn't believe in. And instead I wanted to go a different route.

I did bet on the internal team and the ownership and the commitment from everybody involved was incredible. This was May. We had to go live — there was a commitment to the street that we would go live by October, which any of your listeners who have done websites know that five months is a very short time to do a completely new ecommerce website.

The day before we went live, one of the leaders came to me and he said, okay, Julie, there's multiple things that could happen. We can either go live, it doesn't hold and we both get fired. We can not go live and then we both get fired. Or we can go live, it works, and we keep our jobs.

Siobhan: I know which option you probably were betting on.

Julie: So we went live and we didn't have a rollback plan. We were just pedal to the metal, but it held and it started the massive turnaround where this website was functional and attracted new customers and drove customers into the stores and really started the flywheel of retail working.

Siobhan: It also established that the technology department was to be trusted and was going to own its own future basically. So it was going to be building things that they knew how to fix when they went wrong, which was a definite mindset change for the company, right?

Julie: Absolutely. That ownership — it no longer was outsourced. It was now owned by the team and they cared for it and they wanted it to be successful.

Redefining the Relationship With Tech Vendors

Siobhan: I actually want to talk a little bit because it comes up a few times in your career, and this is obviously part of any technologist's role, dealing with vendors. You had a number of different times where you had to change the tenor of the relationship that existed with the vendors. Could you talk a little bit about that? What advice would you give to anybody out there who is potentially navigating a new relationship or looking to enter a new relationship?

Julie: Vendors had a lot of control in the Lululemon environment. There were vendors that were paying millions and millions of dollars to — and they were deciding our future. We were implementing their roadmap. That works okay when you're a $2 billion company, maybe. Maybe it does, but it's not going to work when you're a $10 billion company.

We had a moment after that website crash when we brought in the vendor that we had outsourced the website to. I asked them, I needed a solution so we weren't going to have another outage. They presented me with a $6 million plan that gave me the option after six hours to flip a switch to a new...

Siobhan: After six hours of being down.

Julie: After six hours of being down, they wanted to charge me $6 million for it. My team was in this meeting watching and I told them that this is not, in not so nice words, that this is not the direction that we are going forward. I need them to be a partner in support of our future and helping take responsibility for the success of Lululemon, not take advantage of our situation. So I didn't do it. We continued to take control of our own destiny.

Advice for people would be: understand, first of all, you have to have vendors who are going to be invested in your success. And with every vendor, understand and be deliberate about the choice of giving away control. We use this notion of buy for commodity and build for competitive advantage. So those things which were not differentiators to Lululemon, we would go ahead and buy. But those things that really differentiated us and made us part of our secret sauce were things that we would build internally.

Ultimately we created an architecture where every vendor solution was a piece of the larger puzzle and we controlled that overall puzzle and we could plug in the vendors as we wanted to. So it was a journey of taking back control. You'll hear that as a theme, I think.

Building Lululemon's India Tech Hub

Siobhan: That makes sense. It's a good theme to keep going with. But at one point in your tenure at Lululemon during the pandemic, you decided that you were going to build an Indian tech hub. You wanted that flexibility. You wanted the people in the different time zones to be able to support the business.

Part of that, though — because again, going back to the importance of culture — was you wanted to make sure that the culture carried over to India. But you knew that it couldn't just clone what was working in North America and plop it there. So how did you scale Lululemon's culture globally during that time?

Julie: This is probably one of the most important pieces of my journey at Lululemon because I learned so much. The frustration had come from all of the vendors that we were working with, including many Indian vendors who were working in the old-school model. We use the word offshore. These are the offshore team, which by definition is a team that's not here with me and I can ship work over. They do the work, they ship it back. That model wasn't working, especially during COVID, which is when we opened ITH, which is our India Tech Hub.

I made a flip comment walking with my leaders one time and we were six feet apart walking the sidewalks of Seattle. I made a comment, I just wish that we could have our own team. One of my leaders said, we can do that. And that's what started it.

From the very beginning, we wanted this to be a Lululemon team and we wanted to differentiate. The Lululemon brand was not known in Bangalore. They're putting stores in now, but at the time, Lululemon what? Competing against all of our competitors and big tech, etc., was going to be difficult for us. So we knew that we wanted to be special and we believed that the Lululemon culture was really special.

We designed from the beginning to have this be a place that modeled the values that we had across the rest of the technology organization — inclusion. At the time there was 51% of the talent market, of the graduating class, was women, but only 27% of women were in the actual technology workforce. We saw that as an opportunity. Lululemon is a brand that was 80% women. We wanted to really design a place where women would want to come to work. That was one of our values from the very beginning. But not just women, men and everyone. So inclusion was a big part of it.

Culture was a big part of it. I spent a lot of time with the leaders there, really talking about the culture of Lululemon, really getting them that safety that we talked about earlier, getting them to feel safe. And pretty soon we built a place that was magnetic. We went from this unknown brand to this brand that was punching above its weight class in terms of market differentiation, getting a lot of press. It's because of the culture that we were able to establish there with leaders that really cared about it and made it a place where innovation was happening on the daily. It became our best piece of our global workforce. That is something I'm certainly very proud of today.

Siobhan: Throughout the book, you share these deliberate steps that you take to build the culture and the magnetic effects it had in multiple occasions for people to come and want to work. You had also done that at REI where you made a couple changes and people were suddenly, we want to go work there as technologists. This one stood out because you literally went to India and weren't just meeting with the leaders. You were walking around in the neighborhoods where the people who you would work with, where they lived, the people they were interacting with, and showing that genuine interest in people's day-to-day lives that built the trust and then created this dynamic workforce.

Julie: Just curious. Bringing in curiosity to understand what's different that makes India special. Because, as you said earlier, I didn't want to just make the North American Lululemon the same in India, because that's not genuine. So it was combining the cultures of Lululemon and the cultures of India.

Why the CIO Belongs at the Strategy Table

Siobhan: There's a point in the book when you describe being invited to the executive leadership team at Lululemon and how that changed the dynamic for your own work, for your team's work, for the role of technologists in Lululemon. Can you talk a little bit about that? Can you maybe share some thoughts on what you think companies might be missing out by not having the CIO involved in strategic discussions?

Julie: For context, I came in reporting to the COO. And when Calvin McDonald was named the CEO, he invited me to be a direct report and to be on his executive leadership team. What I learned was that has nothing to do with me. My team was so excited because all of a sudden they had all been promoted. Technology had a seat at the table where strategy was being determined. Being able to be part of that allowed us to really understand where the company wanted to go and for there not to be a delay or a lag in translation to the technology team.

One of the things that Calvin believed in and I valued a ton was that he believed that technology was a strategic enabler, not a support function. Because of that, we were able to do so much for the company and to enable its global growth. There was just — I don't even know how to describe it — we had so much going on. Imagine this business that's growing as rapidly as it was, and every aspect of the growth required different technology. That was enabled because we were there when the decisions were being made and had full context and could actually participate, drive, and shape the strategy conversations.

Siobhan: So you weren't getting it after the fact. Your team wasn't hearing potentially three different priorities about where they should be focusing.

What Companies Are Getting Wrong About AI and Layoffs

Siobhan: You wrote the book at a time when companies are still trying to figure out how AI fits in their workplaces. There's a few points throughout the book where you flag specific areas where you think businesses are getting it wrong, how you see companies exploring and potentially making mistakes.

One is by treating AI only as a technology problem. You talk about AI hairballs that they're creating as a result. The other is selling the upside of AI while ignoring people's very real fears and feelings about it. You compare that to the return to office mandates. What would you recommend or what would you say that companies should do to avoid these traps or what kind of approach would you recommend instead?

Julie: I'm so glad you brought this up. This is such an important topic today. What we're seeing is that there's a lot of focus on the technology. If you look back at any technology transformation we've had in the past, there's always been a focus on the technology before it really gets real. AI is real. It is truly transforming industries. But at the end of the day, we're still people and people are still leading the cause.

We see last year, 2025, there is 1.1 million layoffs attributed to AI. The reality is that only somewhere between 5% and 15% actually were related to AI. So companies today are creating this mass fear in the industry of AI is taking jobs. It is some jobs. But what's happening more often than not is that jobs are getting changed. Functions are getting automated instead of people getting automated. It's the people that adapt are the ones that survive.

But because there's this massive AI washing happening, there's a lot of fear. And with fear and these massive layoffs — if I'm a member of a company that just laid off 300 people in the name of AI, where's my safety? Do I trust this company?

My advice to these companies is be honest. You over-hired. AI is not coming through and doing something to you. You are leaders who are making choices and they may be absolutely the right choices, I don't know, but realize you're dealing with humans. And not just the humans that you lay off, but also the humans that stay. What message are you sending to them? How are you thinking about your culture through all this? Because that's what's going to make or break companies — do you have the culture that's going to allow you to operate at speed and at scale when things get tough?

Siobhan: When you're talking about the people who are left behind — what kind of work can you expect from people who are operating in that fear, in that environment where they're constantly questioning, am I going to be next?

The Future of Leadership Is Human

Siobhan: Julie, I really appreciate your joining me today. Is there anything that we didn't touch on today that you would like to bring up that you wish that I had asked about?

Julie: Absolutely. First of all, this is a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. I would just say that I am really excited about the future. What I want is, I want leaders to know that their opportunity is still to lead people, not technology. The technology is the easy part, especially in the age of AI. But we have to think about how we are showing up as leaders to create the future that we intend.

Siobhan: That is a wonderful note to end on. Once again, Chief Impact Officer — it is out on June 16th. I wish you good luck with the book, Julie, and look forward to seeing what you do next.

Julie: Thank you so much.