Jamie Gerrard

A little bit about me.

Since 2017, I have run my consulting business from Halifax, Nova Scotia, working hands-on with senior leaders and their teams across Canada, from customer research to the improvements your team carries forward.

Recent work includes:

• Piloting a new member experience with a credit union's front-line team
• Building a customer advisory council for credit unions
• Researching what each department of a municipality needed before choosing a new system
• Redesigning a provincial health authority's online portals
• Leading a law firm's marketing strategy and website redesign, and coaching its marketing lead
• Auditing analytics and ad tracking so teams can trust the data
• Setting up a legal tech team to run its own marketing and reporting with AI
• Designing an AI voice-to-text product back in 2019

My career before consulting.

I taught comic-book drawing classes as a freelancer before any of this became a career. First at the public library, then at 2 junior highs.

Those same libraries hired me not long after, and I stayed for nearly 7 years. All my roles in the library were public-facing, mostly in circulation. I studied library and information technology partway through and moved into information services.

Somewhere along the way, I started teaching myself web design and development, then went back to NSCC (Nova Scotia Community College) for a third time to study web programming. I freelanced as a web designer while studying and for a while after finishing school.

Not long after graduating in web programming, I moved into a branch operations supervisor role at the library, supporting a team of 16 and overseeing the schedule, library programming, and the branch budget. Around the same time, a mutual friend introduced me to 2 marketers starting an agency. I thought about it and then left the library to become one of their founding web developers.

Almost 11 years at the agency followed, starting as a front-end developer, then team lead, then manager of a 14-person web development team, then in digital strategy, and finally on the senior leadership team, where I built the user experience team while still supporting digital strategy and an internal team of more than 65 people across departments.

Titles were only half the story. I supported HR and operations throughout: performance reviews, growth plans for team members, recruitment, and retention. Growing the agency and growing its people went hand in hand.

After leaving the agency, I joined a telecommunications tech startup as director of product and marketing, leading an 18-person team covering product, engineering, user experience, digital marketing, and operations. I gave myself 14 months to recreate my agency successes in a smaller setting, focused on building the team and maturing the product, and did it in 8 months. Every one of those HR and operations skills came with me.

After a brief stint at a business consulting firm focused on service design, I started my consulting business.

What I bring to your team.

Over 25 years, I have built and led marketing, product, and user experience teams in-house, and served on senior leadership teams. That experience shapes how I work with your team:

• Customer experience research and strategy, tied to the decisions your leaders need to make
• Digital strategy and marketing plans your team can run and build on
• Measurement and reporting that show what's working and what changed
• Research with the people who use what you offer, including more than 100 usability sessions
• Training and coaching, with more than 200 people trained in UX, service design, marketing, and AI, and talks at Volta and IGNITE Atlantic

AI now speeds up much of how I work. My judgment and your team's input still decide what matters, and sensitive information is handled with care.

I have worked at nearly every level of an organization, including most of the roles held by the people on the teams I work with.

Outside of work, most of my time goes to my family and our 3 dogs. My son and I play Warhammer together, I recently started rebuilding my graphic novel collection, and I still get back to World of Warcraft when the week allows. 90s hip hop is the soundtrack to most of it.