LEO Innovation Lab
References from this period: 4 LinkedIn recommendations, full text. They vouch for the role, not for any one claim.
Proof points: 13
| Role | Product | Situation | Task | Action | Result | Year | Skills |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PM/GM at LEO Innovation Lab | Diagnosis App Prototype smartphone app diagnosing skin conditions with machine learning | A moonshot: could a smartphone camera diagnose skin conditions? A 12-person team of data scientists, ML and computer vision engineers, wired for logic and certainty, in the deep uncertainty of product discovery. His first deep experience leading an ML team. | Lead the product direction, prioritisation and strategy, and get a working prototype that could be evaluated. | Worked with dermatologists to redesign closed-loop diagnosis and the ML training platform. Bootstrapped the ML engine with clinical decision trees. Designed the pipeline for data collection and analysis. Models were evaluated against a set of pre-tested images the dermatologists had all voted on. Not a medical device by design: disclaimers made clear it was not a diagnosis. Evaluated go-to-market and identified seven paths to market. | Over 80% accuracy across three skin conditions. Doubled the labelling output of the in-house image labelling platform. | Nov 2018 - Jan 2020 | AI, machine learning, computer vision, healthcare, discovery, prototyping, growth, launch, team leadership |
| PM/GM at LEO Innovation Lab | Skincoach Skincoach, a patient-support app for terminally ill cancer patients, built in partnership with Amgen | Amgen, one of the world's largest biotech companies and a leading maker of immunotherapy treatments, wanted to help patients manage the skin reactions that come with treatment. Those reactions affect quality of life and, in some cases, whether a patient can stay on treatment. Nothing existed for the time between oncologist appointments. | Build a product for this audience under strict regulatory and ethical constraints, and agree a partnership model with Amgen that neither company had used before. | Interviewed terminally ill patients and worked with oncologists to reimagine care between appointments. Every decision intentional and judged with sensitivity: no moving fast and breaking things. Dynamically spliced video to simulate personalised dermatology consultations, designed for simplicity and trust. Negotiated a new partnership model with Amgen that challenged convention. | Full product lifecycle in 8 months, on time and on budget. Live closed pilot in Spain and France. The partnership model was later adopted by Amgen's core business as an exemplar for innovation partnerships. | Feb 2018 - Oct 2018 | regulated, healthcare, patients, discovery, ways of working, growth, launch, domains, international, stakeholders, partnerships, budget |
| PM/GM at LEO Innovation Lab | TREAT TREAT, an app addressing underlying causes of inflammatory conditions through personalised nutrition advice, delivered as a decision-tree chatbot with nutritionists behind it. LEO Innovation Lab's first and flagship product. | The flagship product had a lot of attention, but was in trouble behind the scenes: massive tech debt, massive churn, no prioritisation, flaky metrics, unclear reporting lines and responsibilities, and no pathway to profitability. | Parachuted in with a 6-month mandate to stabilise it and assess viability. | Everything was on fire. Let some things burn and watched long enough to see which big patterns were broken, then started at the top of the funnel and worked through. Paused the service to refactor faster. Defined the value proposition and put KPIs into the daily workflow so the team steered by numbers. Set an experiment-led rhythm. Two levers: finding the fit before sign-up, and finding the fit inside the product. | Halved customer acquisition costs. Increased activation 7x. Both levers worked. | Nov 2016 - Aug 2017 | healthcare, ways of working, growth, activation, retention, funnels, experimentation, KPIs, roadmap, launch, 0 to 1, team leadership |
| PM/GM at LEO Innovation Lab | BetterVisitBot a pre-briefing chatbot for doctor consultations | Patients sometimes get intimidated by the doctor, and don't get the most out of their consultation, or forget what was said. | Prototype it with GPs. | Hid a dermatologist in an adjacent room to simulate a consultation chatbot. | Right idea, too early. Now it isn't. | 2016 to 2020 | AI, machine learning, computer vision, healthcare, patients, discovery, prototyping, growth, launch, team leadership |
| PM/GM at LEO Innovation Lab | company all-hands the monthly all-hands | Optimising the onboarding funnel at LEO Innovation Lab, on the hypothesis that more notification opt-ins would raise activation. | Test a contextually-triggered opt-in shown at exactly the right moment. | The split test won on conversion but activation barely moved: the opt-in sat too late in the funnel. Rolled out a simpler opt-in early in the funnel, lifting net activation, and presented the mistake at the next company all-hands. | The monthly all-hands changed from presenting vanity metrics to mistakes made and lessons learnt. | Nov 2016 - Aug 2017 | healthcare, growth, conversion, activation, funnels, experimentation, launch |
| PM/GM at LEO Innovation Lab | prototyping and user interviews Ways of working across LEO Innovation Lab's product teams | Anthropologists were on staff at the lab, but product teams outsourced the investigation and got learnings second-hand. | Raise the quality bar across the lab, not just his own team, without a mandate over the other teams. | Championed design sprints and user testing. Made rapid prototyping and direct user interviews standard practice across all product teams. First product lead to present mistakes and learnings at the company all-hands. | Prototyping and user interviews became the norm across the lab. The monthly all-hands moved from vanity metrics to mistakes made and lessons learnt. | Nov 2016 - Jan 2020 | AI, computer vision, pharma, healthcare, patients, prototyping, incubation, ways of working, turnaround, 0 to 1, startup, team leadership |
| PM/GM at LEO Innovation Lab | testing beats opinions How design disagreements get settled | At Host Europe, as design manager in a PRINCE2 waterfall setup, a passionate argument with a graphic designer, each convinced their idea was right. Neither knew about testing. | A decade later, at LEO Innovation Lab, the same disagreement with a product designer: he preferred A, Tom preferred B. | They agreed to test it that afternoon. | Users preferred something entirely different, option C. The poor decision was anchoring on their own ideas and locking out better alternatives. Detaching from ego changed everything: it is not about who has the best idea, it is about creating space for learning. | 2005 and about 2017 | AI, computer vision, pharma, healthcare, patients, prototyping, incubation, turnaround, startup, team leadership |
| PM/GM at LEO Innovation Lab | Amgen partnership model Innovation partnership between LEO Innovation Lab and Amgen for Skincoach | Partnerships operated as mercenaries not missionaries. The standard contracting process was delivery to be completed (output), not outcomes. | Negotiate a partnership model that allowed building and piloting inside the constraints of two regulated companies. | Managed stakeholders on both sides and negotiated a new partnership model and ways of working. It challenged convention at the time. | The contract model and ways of working were later adopted by Amgen's core business as an exemplar for innovation partnerships. Tom led in-market discovery and delivery under it. | Feb 2018 - Oct 2018 | regulated, healthcare, patients, discovery, ways of working, growth, launch, domains, international, stakeholders, partnerships, budget |
| PM/GM at LEO Innovation Lab | TREAT team TREAT team, about 15 people including a product lead and a product manager | Brought in to troubleshoot the flagship product. The existing team were passionate but struggling to fight fires, and already had their own product lead and PM; it needed delicacy to keep their passion and expertise while helping them out. | Take over the team without losing it. | Started as a consultant for the first month, then proposed as the lead with the team reporting to him; that needed trust and humility, so the team got the option to veto. They went ahead. Fires, chaos, blurred reporting lines, people problems; the service paused to refactor faster; morale at rock bottom. Kept the faith: new cadences, new ways of working. | The team came out the other side intact and stronger, with real trust, and then halved acquisition costs and 7x'd activation. | Nov 2016 - Aug 2017 | healthcare, ways of working, activation, retention, roadmap, launch, 0 to 1, team leadership |
| PM/GM at LEO Innovation Lab | TREAT closure TREAT, LEO Innovation Lab's flagship product | Six months in, the metrics were transformed: acquisition cost halved, activation up 7x. The product had a lot of attention inside the lab and was the first thing LEO Innovation Lab had launched. | Answer the second half of the mandate: is it viable? | Looked at the unit economics rather than the growth curve. As customers increased, nutritionist costs grew with them. The 1:1 model did not scale, and the technology to replace the nutritionist did not exist yet. Recommended the business be closed. | The recommendation was accepted and Tom wound the project down, preventing further sunk investment. Turning around the metrics is not the same as proving viability; sometimes the right call is to stop even after making things better. | Aug 2017 | healthcare, ways of working, growth, activation, retention, roadmap, launch, 0 to 1, team leadership |
| PM/GM at LEO Innovation Lab | Diagnosis App data pipeline Image labelling platform and data pipeline for the diagnosis app | Labelling by dermatologists was critical for model performance, and a significant bottleneck. | Get more labelled data through the system without lowering its quality. | Interviewed every dermatologist on the labelling work to understand how they actually worked, then redesigned the in-house image labelling platform around that. Designed the pipeline for data collection and analysis to feed it. | Doubled dermatologist labelling throughput. Less of their time on labelling training data, more labelled data for the models. | Nov 2018 - Jan 2020 | AI, machine learning, computer vision, healthcare, discovery, prototyping, growth, launch, team leadership |
| PM/GM at LEO Innovation Lab | Diagnosis App paths to market Go-to-market evaluation for a moonshot ML prototype in dermatology | A functioning prototype, but heavy regulatory barriers and no clear path to market. | Work out how, or whether, a moonshot prototype could reach a market. | Evaluated go-to-market systematically and mapped the options with the team. | Identified seven paths to market, with the trade-offs of each, for the lab to decide on. | 2019 | AI, machine learning, computer vision, regulated, healthcare, discovery, prototyping, growth, launch, team leadership |
| PM/GM at LEO Innovation Lab | LEO lab model LEO Innovation Lab as an operating model | LEO Pharma could see digital disruption coming to healthcare. Its answer was an arm's-length innovation lab: better to disrupt ourselves than let a competitor do it. Keeping it separate made sense: different thinking, different ways of working, experts from all sorts of fields. A true melting pot. | Build and ship ventures inside that model, and get them home to the core business. | They did. The lab was incredibly agile, with rapid learning cycles and brilliant peers, but too remote: the innovations struggled to find a home in the core business. | The lab worked in isolation; the parent ship sailed on unchanged, and the model was not sustainable. Disruption cannot be outsourced to a separate unit and grafted back on later; the parent has to change too. That conclusion took Tom to Novo to try the harder bet from inside. | Nov 2016 - Jan 2020 | AI, computer vision, pharma, healthcare, patients, prototyping, incubation, ways of working, turnaround, startup, team leadership, remote |
Tell me about LEO Innovation Lab
source: Tom's own account
LEO Innovation Lab was an independent healthtech incubator established by LEO Pharma.
Product leads were essentially mini-CEOs for each venture, and I worked there from 2016 to 2020 across three product roles:
- TREAT: Parachuted into underperforming flagship product, turned it around, then recommended closure
- Skincoach: Built an app for terminally ill cancer patients - some of most meaningful work I've done
- Diagnosis App: Led ML and computer vision team
I also drove adoption of prototyping, and direct user interviews across the organisation, and changed the all-hands format from sharing vanity stats to sharing mistakes.
The innovation lab model ultimately wasn't sustainable, but it was a formative career moment - accelerated learning, brilliant peers, rapid iteration.
Want to know more? Ask about TREAT, Skincoach, the Diagnosis App, or why the innovation lab model didn't survive.
Direct answers
- BetterVisitBot: a pre-briefing chatbot for doctor consultations. Patients sometimes get intimidated by the doctor, and don't get the most out of their consultation, or forget what was said. Worked with GPs to prototype it. I hid a dermatologist in an adjacent room to simulate a consultation chatbot. Right idea, too early. Now it isn't.
- Title: PM/GM, also written Product Owner, Product Lead or Product Lead / GM on different CVs. Same role: product leads were mini-CEOs for each venture.
- Company context: the Lab was a startup incubator at arm's length from LEO Pharma, a 12,000-person pharma company. So it was innovation, startup, pharma, health-tech, enterprise and AI at once.
- Size: I joined when the Lab was 30 people and it was 130 when I left. Multiple startup teams of around 3 to 15 people each.
- Scope: each team had one product owner, who was in effect a mini-CEO and head of product. I was the sole product lead on mine.
source: Tom's own account, direct answers
Related
- TREAT: tell me about TREAT LEO.R1
- Skincoach: tell me about Skincoach LEO.R2
- Diagnosis App: do you have machine learning experience LEO.R3
- TREAT: Why didn't the innovation lab work? LEO.STORY.MODEL