Jason Doucette

I’ve spent 30 years building systems and then the teams that run them: contact-centre software at Royal Bank, live event ticketing at a Toronto startup, seven years consulting on ad tech and data, and almost ten at Rogers Sports & Media. At Rogers I built the data automation function as its first hire, and today I lead the IT delivery team behind the company’s ad sales and subscription revenue.

I still build on the side, increasingly with AI coding tools. That’s where most of the writing on this site comes from: what actually works once the demo is over.

1. Variation 5February 2021 — Present

   Director, Ad Technology Operations — Rogers Sports & Media

   Toronto

   Lead Media IT Delivery. The team runs the 10–20 SaaS and on-prem business systems behind all of Rogers Sports & Media’s ad sales and BDU subscription revenue, covering change management, onboarding, patching, validation, and customization. The role began inside revenue operations, owning ad tech, Salesforce, and data automation, with corporate IT handling delivery. Over successive reorgs, the IT delivery teams moved under me, including Salesforce CRM and Marketing Cloud, and ad tech and data moved to other groups.

   • Accountable for a $5–8M/year capex portfolio and a team of 15–30 employees and contractors.
   • Saw a 2.5-year migration of the TV rights and scheduling system through to completion across several reorgs. Now decommissioning the legacy platform.
   • Rebuilt the Salesforce delivery model several times (contractors, consultancies, in-house) to fit budget and demand.
   • Delivered workflow changes that moved Salesforce closer to being the single source of truth for sales activity.
   • Partnered with the AI risk committee to evaluate and enable generative AI tools.

2. Variation 4February 2017 — February 2021

   Senior Manager, Data Development & Automation — Rogers Sports & Media

   Toronto

   Built the function from scratch as its first hire, and later hired three direct reports. Worked hands-on with digital advertising data, building automated pipelines and reporting for the revenue group.

   • Built a report generator that automated tens of thousands of digital campaign reports in Excel and PowerPoint.
   • Launched an automated daily briefing for the entire revenue group, summarizing the previous day’s key events across digital and TV.
   • Prototyped and delivered a web portal for segmenting first- and third-party audience data and delivering reporting.
   • Built a linear TV campaign optimizer that placed spots in programming that target audiences were more likely to be watching.
   • Promoted to Director in 2021 when digital ad tech, Salesforce, and business systems support moved into the role.

3. Variation 3January 2010 — February 2017

   Owner — Thrust Labs

   Toronto

   Independent consultancy building back-end, web, and mobile systems, working solo or embedded in client teams. Usually took over existing systems, became the domain expert quickly, and stayed on long term through new development, maintenance, and support.

   • Built a custom ETL and reporting system for a national digital advertising agency that pulled data from 15+ ad platforms into dashboards and reports.
   • Took over a pay-per-click ad management platform, adding task automation and cutting key processes from minutes to under a second.
   • Advised an e-commerce company as it grew its technology team from 1 to 10 and rebuilt its platform.
   • Built sales automation and inventory management for a print and online business directory.
   • Handled business development and proposals, and coordinated specialist subcontractors as needed.

4. Variation 2July 2005 — December 2009

   Technology Director — LGG Media Inc.

   Toronto

   First technology hire at a Toronto startup that built and licensed platforms for media brands. Starting from a nearly blank slate, I chose the technology stack and set engineering practices, hired, wrote proposals, and architected and built the applications and infrastructure.

   • Built a live event ticketing platform with print-at-home and mobile delivery, plus onsite sales and redemption. Provided the ticketing back end for Rogers Wireless Box Office, North America’s first end-to-end mobile ticketing service.
   • Built a common repository for contest and survey data, with ad-hoc querying across entries.
   • Aggregated entertainment data from multiple sources to provide in-depth content for major Canadian media sites.
   • Built internet radio players with commerce, music discovery, and social features, adding interaction to a listen-only medium.
   • Shipped an iPhone karaoke app with in-app purchases, just after Apple introduced them.

5. Variation 1May 1996 — July 2005

   Sr. Technical Analyst — Royal Bank of Canada

   Toronto

   Built contact-centre software for telephony and customer service, progressing from developer to project leader of a team of four.

   • Built IVR applications for several years, and helped migrate the IVR platform to an external provider.
   • Designed and built a predictive dialer agent application that connected to the dialing server and showed agents customer data and scripts.
   • Designed and built a CTI desktop application that gave agents full call control and shared customer data with connected applications.
   • Led the team responsible for several desktop banking applications built for contact centres.