Hi, I'm Simon Emmanuel Roux, a strategist and maker from Montréal. I help teams find the idea worth backing, then I build the systems, write the copy and read the budget so it holds up. I work in French and English.
I think of the job as being a creative doula: helping people get to their own best thinking, not handing them mine. On my own time I make apps, a music box for my kids and small tools that save me an hour. Tambour, French for drum, has been the name of my practice since 2011.
The idea
AI is very good at signal. Ask it about a market, a brand or a buyer and it gives you the consensus, clean and fast. Your competitors get the same answer. The useful part is what the average leaves out: the phrase a client keeps repeating, the side project of the designer across the table, the line in the strategic plan that quietly contradicts the brief. That is the noise, and I go looking for it.
How I work
- Start with the raw material. Briefs, transcripts, plans and past decks come before any opinion.
- Get an independent read first. I ask for a read before I share my hypothesis, so I can see what I'm anchored on.
- Map the language. People see their world through the words they live in: their strategic plan, their training, their industry.
- Name the tension. Then propose a frame someone can act on.
- Keep the labels apart. What was stated, what was verified, and what is still a hypothesis.
AI compresses production, not decisions.
Stories
The wink
Before a pitch, I worked out who would be around the table. One designer had a small side project with a little animated gif. We placed it, tiny, in a corner of the deck. It was the one thing everyone named when they chose us: "you get us".
The real audience
The brief was addressed to an events team. Reading it on its own terms showed that the people who mattered were the community and brand leads. That changed who the whole pitch spoke to.
Nine interviews
Nine executive interviews became personas built on their own phrases, a clear shift in how they saw themselves, and a concept with measures they could hold it to.
The lab
I also build things on my own time: apps, small automations, a music box. It's where I learn what the tools can really do, and where the systems thinking shows rather than tells.
Notes
Writing is how I check my own thinking. The first notes are on their way.
- Finding noise in the signal Why the average answer is the one to question.
- Language maps Reading a buyer through the words they live in.
- AI compresses production, not decisions What gets faster, and what still takes a person.