Unilever Prestige and Tatcha CIO Narayan Parasuraman on why unlearning, lived experience, and vulnerability are the currency of modern leadership.
Ghadeer Redler
Head of Multimedia, Thought Leadership & Customer Stories
Workday
Narayan Parasuraman, CIO of Unilever Prestige and Tatcha, doesn't call himself a lifelong learner. He calls himself a lifelong unlearner.
"Our brain has a certain amount of capacity to innovate,” he says. “And that capacity quadruples when you unlearn."
That 25-year path runs through semiconductors and carbon nanotubes, mainframe modernization for global banks, and rate engines for insurers—then reverse logistics at FedEx, private wealth compliance, and retail at Walmart Labs, Kohl's, and Nike, before early-childhood education at KinderCare. Today he oversees eight prestige beauty brands under the Unilever umbrella, including Tatcha.
To an outsider, these industries share little connection. To Narayan, a single thread runs through them all: "Every product I built was in service of an end user—to better their experience throughout their journey."
Across this 25-year trajectory, Narayan’s playbook centers on three core takeaways for modern leadership:
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Entering new sectors—from retail supply chains to early-childhood learning centers—requires leaving ego at the door. Every company possesses a unique cultural DNA and operating rhythm.
"If I go in with the mindset that I know a lot and that it's plug-and-play, that never works," Narayan explains.
He draws a sharp line between learned experiences (toolkits, legacy playbooks, rigid frameworks), which rarely transfer well across industries or company cultures, and lived experiences (reading a room, building trust, navigating organizational ambiguity, leading with empathy), which are the constant denominator.
At KinderCare, this mindset forced a fundamental pivot. Where traditional enterprise corporate strategy defaults to building "one size fits all" platforms for scale, early childhood education demanded the opposite: "One size fits one." Technology had to cater to the distinct needs of an individual child, parent, and teacher.
"You cannot sell anything to your customer anymore. You have to earn their trust. Customers have to seek you out for the value you offer."
That same principle—earning trust rather than mandating it—shapes how Narayan operates inside his own organization.
Narayan’s current post requires a delicate balancing act. As CIO of Unilever Prestige, he establishes the enterprise foundation across technology, data, cybersecurity, AI, and product management for eight distinct luxury brands. Simultaneously, as the technology and digital user-experience leader inside Tatcha, he operates embedded within one of those very brands.
"One side of your mouth says no, and the other has to say yes," Narayan says candidly. "You have to balance it perfectly to play both roles."
Managing a brand portfolio while sitting inside one requires leading by influence rather than top-down mandate. Having sharpened this muscle across multi-tenant platforms at Walmart Labs and Nike's global brand portfolio, his strategy rests on three principles:
That discipline matters most in an industry that runs on feeling, not features.Prestige beauty is an industry driven by emotion, storytelling, and rapid cultural shifts. In a landscape governed by six-second TikTok attention spans, tech leaders cannot operate as back-office system maintainers; they must think like marketers, finance heads, and HR leaders.
Narayan’s teams do not produce marketing content, they build the real-time connective tissue behind it. By linking social commerce engagement data directly to conversion metrics, they provide creative and merchandising teams with immediate visibility into what content is resonating and what should be retired.
"Technology helps create those experiences, push them to the right channels, and measure how customers convert," he notes. "AI doesn't make things simpler; it makes things more complex. Almost 78% of companies investing in AI are simultaneously investing in guardrails and cybersecurity. The win is adoption discipline."
Early in his career, Narayan measured success by tactical milestones: implementations, deployments, and product launches. Today, his metric is deeply human.
"Success is also when something doesn't work. Success is fast failing," he says.
He is candid about past missteps: moments when tight deadlines or constrained budgets led to team burnout and lost talent. Those losses reshaped his entire hiring and leadership philosophy around radical transparency and vulnerability.
"As leaders, the only currency you have is trust—and vulnerability is what builds it."
When interviewing talent today, his pitch is straightforward: "Are you on this journey with me? It's not as shiny as it sounds. There will be bumps. But we're going to learn a lot of things together."
Looking past metrics, platforms, and migrations, Narayan defines his true legacy not by corporate systems, but by human capital.
"I could write a memoir that people forget quickly," he says. "Or I could build a community of leaders and mentor them so they carry the leadership forward. That's the legacy I want."
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