TL;DR

I’ve founded research and operations practices and mentored teams, developing tools and frameworks that achieve results, like a 75% adoption rate for Wattpad’s Coin Wallet feature in a single quarter. I co-managed a startup team to secure a $100K grant in six months, and co-authored a white paper that influenced $805M in federal socio-environmental innovation funding.

Experience

04/2025 - PRESENT

Loopio - User Experience Research Manager

  • Running and evolving our design metrics program.

  • Building out our generative and continuous discovery research practices, driving insights to recommendations for Product mission teams.

  • Most senior research practitioner = coaching and mentoring Product Designers and Product Managers as research partners.

12/2021 - 01/2024

Wattpad - User Experience Research Operations Manager

  • Founded and directed UX research operations as first-hire, coaching and supporting a research and design team of 11.

  • Led team of 4 on Strategic Research to design Coin Wallet feature; 75% adoption rate in one quarter.

  • Built and managed the User Chats research program (Voice of the Customer) with a dedicated participant pool of 5,000 users, including 200 “power users” for urgent needs; increased program participation as mentor to all client-facing roles from 40% to 80%.

  • Architected the Airtable Insights Repo; simplified self-service knowledge access for 40+ people across 5 depts.

  • 100% Product Manager’s participation in monthly de-risk coaching sessions.

  • Spearheaded and steered cross-functional 2023 restructuring change management strategy in 6 weeks.

  • Part of 2024 10% reduction in force layoffs.

  • About Wattpad: Entertainment (storytelling) B2C platform with 94M global users; Toronto startup now owned by the world’s largest digital comics platform, Naver Webtoon ($2.67B valuation).

11/2021 - 12/2021

Career Transition

  • Hired into the field of UX after 4 months of full-time, self-bootcamped training (upon resigning from previous role at Green Iglu and completing research contract with Centre for Skills).

  • Focus: Human-Centred Design; roadmapping; insights generation & repository architecture; usability testing.

12/2017 - 11/2021

Centre for Skills Development, Burlington - Research Lead, Consultant

  • Fueled future funding of $2.2M over 6 years, lowering costs to $0 for participants of WIST (Women in Skilled Trades) program; Discoveries elevated 120 women into employment since 2018; Initiated inclusion of digital instruction materials – increasing participant access by 90% .

  • My research services contracted 3 times.

2019 Report (lead co-authored)

2021 Report (sole-authored)

09/2020 - 09/2021

Green Iglu Toronto - Development Director, Partnerships

  • Secured $100K+ in funding to grow and distribute 9.6K servings of food across 5 Canadian remote or northern communities, for small startup decreasing food insecurity with greenhouse infrastructure.

10/2019 - 09/2020

Centre for Social Innovation Toronto - Research & Development Writer

  • Coauthored “Unlocking Canadian Social Innovation” resulting in federal government allocation of $805M for socio-enviro innovation in business (submitted to Employment and Social Development Canada).

12/2018 - 10/2019

Bennett Design Associates Toronto - Workplace Strategist & Development Writer

  • Service Design: Analyzed discovery research (facilitated focus groups, surveys, interviews, accessibility testing, participatory design) and co-devised strategy: 3 companies, 215 sq ft of office design, 1,500+ employees; Constructed proposals and won contracts totalling 900K sq ft, for team to design corporate offices.

  • Managed 1 team member (Designer).

05/2017 - 08/2017

TMU (formerly Ryerson University) Toronto - Course Designer & Instructor

  • Designed and taught CC8905 MA Research Specialization and Practice (20 students x 1 course).

  • Engaged graduate-level students with fundamentals for mixed-method research and service design, execution, and analysis.

12/2015 - 08/2017

TMU Toronto - Writing & Language Support Officer

  • Advised, coached and mentored graduate-level students on assignments, exams, funding applications and academic article construction.

  • Championed and strengthened STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) and English As Additional Language students as my specialty focus clients (totalling ~100 clients during tenure).

Professional Associations

12/2024 - PRESENT

Cha Cha Club a members-only association for full-time Research Operations professionals.

Languages

English: native

French: limited working proficiency

Tech, Skills, Insights

Airtable, Amplitude, Alchemer, Asana, Confluence, CSS, DocuSign, Dovetail, dscout, Excel, Fable (accessibility), Figma, Google Suite + Analytics, HTML, Ironclad, Jira, LLMs, Looker, Loom, Microsoft Suite, Miro, Notion, Otter.ai, Redash, Slack, SurveyMonkey, SPSS, Tableau, Trello, UserInterviews, UserTesting, UserZoom

Volunteer Leadership

01/2019 - PRESENT

Stories We Don’t Tell Toronto - Producer, Host & Workshop Leader

  • A storytelling event series, including facilitating story writing and development workshops, and podcast: 25+ live shows produced, 30+ workshops led, 20+ podcasts recorded.

03/2021 - 03/2023

TMU’s Science Discovery Zone Startups Incubator Toronto - Workshop Leader & UX/UI Mentor

  • Co-led annual (3) entrepreneurship discovery workshops for science and engineering students working to launch companies and apps. Focus: user experience, customer experience, and user interaction (UI).

Education

05/2024 - 03/2025

SABR (Society for American Baseball Research) - Advanced Analytics in Baseball, Level 2

  • Reverse engineering statistical calculations using regression analysis and pivot tables to make projections on industry analytics and baseball economics.

2010 - 2017

PhD, Communication & Culture

York University & Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson), Toronto

Specialized in qualitative and quantitative research: Behavioural analysis (participant observation & pattern detection); Motivation Mapping (journey mapping); Rhetorical analysis (motivational language to compel people); Visual semiotics (meaning conveyed by images & nonverbal communication); Research methods design; Field research; Social listening (social media and news analysis); Focus groups; Interviews; Secondary data analysis; Data visualization.

  • 6 academic publications, cited by 20 scholars

  • 2014 Student Paper Prize winner, Canadian Communication Association

    “War Photography After Abu Ghraib: A Preliminary Analysis”

    Colette Brin, CCA President, shared this citation of Joey’s winning essay:

“The jury found Jakob’s concept of War Trophy Photography very compelling. Jakob is thorough and convincing in her explanation of visual semiotics. The author is also fluid in her sharing of the literature, the two examples work well to show how photos limit our readings/experiences of the content and her engagement with the topic make the paper a pleasure to read. And while her paper looks back to WWII and brings War Trophy Photography to the present via Abu Ghraib, War Trophy Photography in the era of new information and communication technology offers endless opportunities for future research.”

2008 - 2010

MA, Sociology

University of Manitoba, Winnipeg

BA, Honours, Sociology

University of Winnipeg, Winnipeg

Core Skills

Change Management, Competitive Testing, Cross-Functional Leadership & Collaboration, Customer Journey Mapping, Data Analysis & Data-Driven Decision Making, Data Privacy & PII Protections, De-Risking & Strategic Foresight, Digital Product Development, Heuristic Evaluation & Task Analysis, Human-Centered Design, Interviews, KPIs & Budgets, Mentorship, Mixed-Methods Design Research, Qualitative & Quantitative Market Research, Repository Architecture, Roadmapping, Service Design, Storytelling & Presentations, Strategic Planning, Surveys, Usability Testing

Metrics

100% Product Manager’s participation in monthly de-risk coaching sessions @ Wattpad | $150K+ awarded for my academic research | 3,000+ students taught | 30+ professional White Papers or Reports | 20+ international conference presentations or invited speaking engagements | Dozens of nonfiction short stories written & performed | 17 academic awards in 9 years | 6 Board of Director seats, including Chair of 2 | 6 academic publications, cited by 20 scholars | 3 community radio programs produced & hosted | 2 short films directed | 2 university courses designed & lectured | countless workshops for writing, social research & UX/CX research

Published Articles + White Papers

Ontario Centre for Workforce Innovation Final Report on the Shared Apprenticeship Model (2019)

  • Suggests the ways shared apprenticeship (between a funder and an employer) offers a modern approach for skilled trades training.

Unlocking Canadian Social Innovation (2018)

  • Coauthored “Unlocking Canadian Social Innovation” resulting in federal government allocation of $805M for socio-enviro innovation in business (submitted to Employment and Social Development Canada).

Abu Ghraib and the Commemorative Violence of War Trophy Photography (2017)

  • PhD Dissertation. War trophy photos, however horrific, serve the purpose to affirm Us vs Them groups when continually shared and viewed.

What Remains of Abu Ghraib: Digital Photography & Cultural Memory (2016) ​

  • This article from the journal Visual Studies focuses on the ongoing functions of viral photos as objects of cultural memory and also highlights their use as war trophies.

Beyond Abu Ghraib: War trophy photography and commemorative violence (2016)

  • Two functions exist for personal war photography: Posing in photos acknowledges the image as trophy, and second, “commemorative violence” emerges from beyond the frame, as the representation is fused with gestural communication and cultural memory.

‘That Worries Me’: Affective and Rhetorical Framing in Fox News The O’Reilly Factor (2013)

  • A case study analysis of Bill O’Reilly’s contradictory verbal and visual cues: With news media as a tool for political communication, there is a contradiction between its ability to be objective and its use of emotional language.

The Stranger in Crisis: Spectacle and Social Response(2010)

  • Master’s Thesis. Argues that people unknown to us, who undergo a traumatic event in public, may not receive our attention or care because we experience “compassion fatigue” from inundation of horrific imagery in our daily lives.