Leadership and management: 17 proof points
Every row that fits this shape of role: the rows the facts page shows first, then the rest in content order. Tom's own account of it: Leadership and management. All shapes, the facts page.
| 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 |
| Marketing Director, EuroDNS | EuroDNS EuroDNS marketing team, run from another country | Based in Copenhagen; the team of four in Luxembourg, visited every two weeks for three days. | Lead a turnaround team without being in the room most of the time. | Set a cadence: fortnightly face-to-face meetings, 1:1s and plenum discussions when in the office, then space to focus and get on with it in between. Available for ad-hoc calls but not hovering. | Structure without micromanagement: clarity on direction, autonomy on execution. It taught him to manage by outcomes rather than tasks, a habit kept since. | Feb 2013 - Nov 2014 | ways of working, turnaround, marketing, team leadership, remote, international |
| Senior Product Manager at Novo Nordisk | Wegovycare Wegovycare, a digital service to drive retention and repeat prescriptions for Wegovy | Applied for a SaMD product role at Novo; put forward instead for a digital solution for a then unheard-of weight-loss medicine. The final-round brief was solution-first: standalone features the business thought would help. Nobody had spoken to patients. | Persuade the business to set the brief aside and start with the problem, then use that as a mandate to change how they worked. | First product team at Novo to interview patients, run discovery, build prototypes and co-create with markets. Led a cross-functional team of 10 across the full product lifecycle; it took persuasion and a leap of faith from stakeholders. | Launched on time and on budget. 10% penetration in the first national market, the biggest adoption of any digital solution at Novo; still live. Asked to scale the ways of working across the organisation and promoted to Associate Product Director. | Mar 2020 - Feb 2022 | pharma, healthcare, patients, discovery, prototyping, ways of working, growth, retention, launch, 0 to 1, team leadership, stakeholders, budget |
| Associate Product Director at Novo Nordisk | Digital Incubation Digital incubation unit for branded digital engagement, evaluating build, buy and partner solutions | Asked after Wegovycare to scale its ways of working across the product organisation: to work across silos and help move the organisation from solution-first project thinking to a product model with an outcomes focus. | Build the unit that shapes the organisation's next big bets, and make problem-first the default. | Built the incubation unit entirely through influence. Designed a portfolio model and a gated incubation pipeline. Wrote the discovery playbook. Coached the incubation PMs. Secured funding and managed resourcing and cross-charges for the incubation teams. Evaluated build, buy and partner options for each bet. | Moved the business from solution-first to problem-first, and from output to outcomes. | Feb 2022 - Feb 2026 | AI, GenAI, regulated, compliance, pharma, healthcare, patients, discovery, incubation, ways of working, growth, retention, funnels, experimentation, launch, brand, team leadership, stakeholders, consumer, budget |
| Associate Product Director at Novo Nordisk | Product Operations standards, artefacts, ways of working | A wider remit across the product pipeline, to complete the move to a product operating model. | Establish metrics across a portfolio of 12 products. | Set product artefacts and quality standards: gate model and deliverables, product-ops metrics, portfolio reports, business case templates, problem and north-star statements. | Helped product teams connect work to commercial outcomes. | Feb 2022 - Feb 2026 | AI, GenAI, regulated, compliance, pharma, healthcare, patients, discovery, incubation, ways of working, growth, retention, funnels, experimentation, launch, brand, team leadership, stakeholders, consumer, budget |
| Associate Product Director at Novo Nordisk | Head of Patient Products Patient Solutions, a portfolio of consumer engagement products (companion apps adjacent to the medicines) | Interim reorg of product teams before the Wegovy Pill project. | Lead 6 experienced PMs building consumer engagement products, managing by outcomes; for a period, before moving into the pill team where the need was greatest. | Individual coaching and weekly experiment sharing; made individual product metrics public. | Broke product silos, established weekly demos and experiment sharing, encouraged learning loops. | Feb 2022 - Feb 2026 | AI, GenAI, regulated, compliance, pharma, healthcare, patients, discovery, incubation, ways of working, growth, retention, funnels, experimentation, launch, brand, team leadership, stakeholders, consumer, budget |
| Associate Product Director at Novo Nordisk | project steercos Chaired project steercos. Flipped the format from status updates to interactive co-creation | Steercos were project management checklists: project not product focused, and unsuited for high-uncertainty discovery-stage products. | Chair project steercos. | Flipped the format from status updates to interactive co-creation. | Cross-functional VPs moved from product sceptics to advocates. | Feb 2022 - Feb 2026 | AI, GenAI, regulated, compliance, pharma, healthcare, patients, discovery, incubation, ways of working, growth, retention, funnels, experimentation, launch, brand, team leadership, stakeholders, consumer, budget |
| Senior Product Manager at Novo Nordisk | Wegovycare Wegovycare, digital patient platform for obesity medicine, built to scale | Every market needed its own version of every digital product, so nothing at Novo had ever scaled beyond one country. | Build one product that many markets could adopt and adapt without forking it. | Designed for scale: modular architecture, feature flags, an integrated CMS and a translation pipeline. Systematised co-creation with the markets so they shaped the product rather than waiting for it. | Novo's first digital health product adopted by multiple markets. First digital Novo product to scale. | Mar 2020 - Feb 2022 | algorithm, API, regulated, pharma, healthcare, patients, discovery, prototyping, ways of working, growth, retention, roadmap, 0 to 1, marketing, team leadership, stakeholders, consumer |
| Head of New Media, Host Europe Group | GX Networks Rename of a publicly listed company | Due to a sale the brand name had gone and the company, a Plc, needed a new one in five weeks. It landed on his desk although he ran online, not brand: known for getting things done. | Rename a publicly listed company, end to end, in five weeks. | The hardest part was agreeing the name; as an old internet company there were domain names and trademarks lying around, which gave options. Then execution: brand identity, corporate website, campaigns, office signage, stationery, email signatures, lawyers, and the stock market ticker. | Done in five weeks. The company became GX Networks. | Jan 2006 - Jun 2008 | brand, domains, deadline |
| Head of New Media, Host Europe Group | New Media New Media department: all online touchpoints, ecommerce, digital campaigns, email marketing and SaaS dashboards across all brands | Promoted from web designer to management team to take ownership of the end-to-end online presence across multiple brands. | Create the department from scratch and run every online channel across every brand: ecommerce portals, SEO, branding, UX, email marketing, blog, development, copy, creative and reporting. | Built a team of five to six. Established KPIs and web metrics to steer the business. Prioritised the development roadmap and briefed the development teams. Introduced self-service support and pioneered site-building tools. Optimised the support centre. Built the affiliate marketing, content marketing and online ads programmes. Scaled SEO to #1 for "domain names", "web hosting" and "dedicated servers". | 123-reg became the first company to register 1 million .uk domains. Sat on the Senior Management Team and the on-call duty rota, still in his 20s. | Jan 2006 - Jun 2008 | turnaround, SEO, funnels, KPIs, roadmap, 0 to 1, brand, marketing, SaaS, startup, ecommerce, domains, web hosting, team leadership, stakeholders |
| 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 | 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 | 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 |
| Group Design Manager, Host Europe Group | group design Design across the group's brands after the Pipex acquisitions | Via acquisitions the company became part of Pipex, the UK's fourth largest broadband provider: multiple brands, multiple offices, each with its own design. | Manage the web design output for the whole group and keep the ecommerce funnels improving while the brands were being stitched together. | Coordinated a team of designers and developers across multiple offices. Created the project and campaign briefs. Led ecommerce across the brands and kept optimising the order process. Laid the SEO groundwork that the New Media department later took to #1 for the core terms. | Design and ecommerce run as one function across the brands. The platform reached 2M+ unique monthly visits in this period. Promoted to Head of New Media in January 2006 to build the department around it. | Aug 2005 - Jan 2006 | turnaround, SEO, funnels, 0 to 1, brand, marketing, SaaS, startup, ecommerce, domains, web hosting, team leadership, stakeholders |