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Sean Yo +ai Product & Innovation Leader Waterloo Region · Remote seanyo.ca

Hi! I'm Sean Yo+ai
I build products
from 0→1

Thirty years across gaming, simulation, SaaS and open technology — products, platforms, ventures, teams and the ecosystems around them.

Sean Yo, in a line-engraved portrait

+ai denotes my AI-augmented practice: I use AI as a collaborative partner while retaining authorship, judgment and accountability. This website was co-created with GPT-5.6 in ChatGPT and Claude Design.

The question I'm working on

How do we work with AI as a tool for humans — one that widens judgment rather than quietly replacing it?

I call my answer the +AI Mindset: AI as a collaborative partner, with authorship, judgment and accountability staying human. In practice that means using it to interrogate ideas, recover evidence and tell me when an argument doesn't hold up — not to produce work I haven't thought through. It started with +AI: An Evolution of Digital Identity, and it's why the mark travels with my name.

15M
Monthly active users served
$10M+
Annual product revenue
$5M+
Annual operation grown from a two-student pilot
50,000+
Learner simulation hours delivered
Selected work
2025–Present

GoToMedia

Principal Product Strategist, Fractional

Senior product leadership on enterprise engagements where product strategy, platform architecture, emerging technology, organizational systems and business risk intersect.

2020–2025

Centre for Virtual Reality Innovation, Conestoga College

Founding Director

Co-founded and grew a two-student pilot into a $5M+ operation with 22 full-time staff, including 10 VR game developers and 2 3D artists. Led product and game design for Campus RPG, a playable JRPG-style exploration of three Conestoga campuses, and directed a Unity-based simulation framework later released as an open educational resource.

2019–2020

PwC Canada

Senior Product Manager

A short-term engagement helping an internal software accelerator move from 0→1: product strategy, product-management practice, and a citizen-developer pipeline inside financial, risk and compliance constraints.

2013–2017

D2L / Desire2Learn

Senior Product Manager, Data & Analytics

Owned a product line serving ~15M monthly active users and $10M+ in annual revenue. Led the 0→1 launch of D2L's first big-data platform across four distributed engineering teams, and chaired the IMS Global Privacy Task Force.

2012

InGamer

Chief Architect

Game design, product and front-end for a real-time second-screen sports gaming platform, licensed by CBC, Rogers and TorStar, sustaining roughly three-hour play sessions alongside live professional sport.

Gaming, open technology & ecosystems
  • Helped found Hive Waterloo in 2012; it became an official Mozilla Hive Learning Community in 2015 and operated through 2018, with early programming at Communitech.
  • Co-author of three officially published Star Wars RPGA Living Force adventures; games club executive and convention coordinator.
  • Graduate research: World of Warcraft: (En)Coding Identity in Synthetic Worlds — identity and embodiment in synthetic worlds.
  • Co-founded Year of Code Waterloo Region; co-editor of Code Like A Girl as it grew toward 40,000 readers.
Things you can actually play

Playable · Browser

Campus RPG

A JRPG-style exploration of three Conestoga campuses, built so new and international students could learn a real environment through exploration and quests. I led product and game design, and the transdisciplinary development from definition through delivery.

Play Campus RPG →
Demo reel · MadCap Adventures
MadCap Adventures — educational games I led game and interaction design for, aligned to US Common Core standards and funded by the Gates Foundation and Pearson Education. Watch on YouTube →
Waterloo.Dev Fest · 2025

Legend Has It: Why AI Should Never Make Management Decisions

Also facilitated Jamming with AI: Introducing PromptCraft as Creative Collaboration. On AI, governance, management and where human judgment has to stay.

Learning Analytics & Knowledge · 2017

Measuring Learner Engagement

Best Technology Practitioner Showcase Award, SoLAR

Presented the Brightspace Class Engagement Dashboard at LAK 2017 in Vancouver — a learning-analytics product I led the design and development of.

Digital Odyssey · 2014

Speaking in Code: The 21st Century Literacy of Programming

Closing keynote

Closing keynote for the Ontario Library Association / OLITA conference.

WordCamp Toronto · 2014

Fixing Inaccessible Content

A practical accessibility talk on common web-accessibility failures and the WCAG techniques that fix them. Still online in full.

ConFoo Montréal · 2012, 2014, 2018

Five talks across six years

  • Getting Started With Web Accessibility — 2012
  • Web Accessibility Development Tools In Action — 2012
  • Real World Retrospectives — 2014
  • Accessibility Foundations — 2018
  • Understanding Product Management — 2018

Accessibility, agile practice and product management. Later served on the ConFoo selection committee several times as a Speaker Advisor, reviewing speakers and submitted presentations.

Southwest/Texas Popular Culture Conference · 2007

Docile Avatars: The Regulation of Bodies in World of Warcraft

Graduate research on identity, embodiment and governance in virtual worlds — presented publicly almost twenty years ago.

Writing & patent
Patent
US 9,832,204 — Method and System for Managing Security Compatibility of Electronic Content, co-inventor
Get in touch

If any of this is useful to you, I'd like to hear about it.

Phone
519.222.2299
Based in
Waterloo Region, Canada
Sean Yo +ai sean.yo@gmail.com 519.222.2299 seanyo.ca © 2026 Sean Yo
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