0 to 1, incubation and new ways of working: 16 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: 0 to 1, incubation and new ways of working. All shapes, the facts page.
| Role | Product | Situation | Task | Action | Result | Year | Skills |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 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 |
| 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 |
| Senior Product Manager at Novo Nordisk | Wegovycare Wegovycare, a digital service to drive retention and repeat prescriptions for Wegovy | The brief was a set of standalone features the business thought would help, but nobody had talked to the patients. | Find the lever that would keep patients on treatment and coming back for repeat prescriptions. | Talked to patients: everyone wanted the same three things, how much weight they will lose, whether this is normal, whether they are on track. Made those the core loop; built a weight-loss prediction model in Excel to answer the first, then a profiling engine to personalise the rest. | 10% penetration in the first national market. Fastest-scaling and biggest-adopted digital product at Novo. | 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 |
| Associate Product Director at Novo Nordisk | CagriSema Digital discovery programme for CagriSema, the company's top drug asset | CagriSema was the first drug to span two therapy areas, diabetes and obesity. Each business unit ran independently with their own priorities and budgets. | Define what digital initiatives should accompany the drug, get both business units to agree, and get it funded. | Started with the problem, and uncovering the new user journeys to create a shared understanding of the problem space across both units. Then ideation: 128 candidate ideas, cut to a shortlist of 5, assumption-tested with prototypes, 4 recommended, each with a funding-gated rollout. Navigated the programme through internal governance. | Funding secured for a portfolio of 4 digital initiatives (a first). Aligned two business units on a common digital strategy (also a first). | Feb 2022 - Feb 2026 | AI, GenAI, regulated, compliance, pharma, healthcare, patients, discovery, prototyping, 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 Marketing, Opbeat | Opbeat Opbeat, developer tools SaaS startup providing application performance monitoring. Backed by the cofounders of Facebook and Instagram. | New product came out of stealth and lacked traction. The audience was developers, who are allergic to advertising. | Build the brand, marketing strategy, team and channels from scratch, and get traction without advertising at people who ignore advertising. | Learnt the developer audience by sitting with the engineers in the team. Defined the core product proposition and the developer narrative, and told the story. Built the brand, the team and the channels from nothing, then ran growth experiments across them. The two biggest levers, the meetup video engine and the pricing restructure, have their own rows. | Trebled traffic and sign-ups in 12 months. The brand became known in the Python, Django and Node.js communities. | Nov 2014 - Apr 2016 | growth, conversion, experimentation, KPIs, launch, 0 to 1, brand, marketing, SaaS, startup, developer tools, team leadership, international, budget |
| Head of Group Strategy, UK2 Group | new domain platform One platform replaced them | 6 brands on 3 different providers, some going direct to the registry, each with different APIs, rules and management fees. | Manage development of a new domain platform. | Owned the business case, budget, specifications, contracts and migration strategy. | One platform replaced them (500,000+ customer domains). | 2008-2010 | turnaround, retention, launch, brand, marketing, ecommerce, domains, web hosting, team leadership, remote, international, budget |
| 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 |
| Head of Marketing, Opbeat | Opbeat Opbeat, B2B devops startup backed by Balderton Capital and the cofounders of Facebook and Instagram | A small startup with no marketing processes, KPIs, reporting or budgeting, and a runway to extend. | Put the basics in and create enough traction to raise. | Introduced marketing processes, KPIs, reporting and budgeting to the business. Grew grassroots meetups and built a video engine to reach developers. | Traction that enabled a $2M bridge-funding round. | Nov 2014 - Apr 2016 | growth, conversion, KPIs, launch, 0 to 1, brand, marketing, SaaS, startup, developer tools, team leadership, international, budget |
| Solo projects, building with AI | TomBot TomBot, a chatbot CV at takenbyninjas.com | Tom wanted to create a novel way of presenting his CV, and find out first-hand what AI can and cannot do. Accuracy of recall was the key criterion: a CV bot that hallucinates is worse than no bot. | Build something real with AI and ship it, in his own content and voice. | Built with Claude Code on the Claude API: chunked RAG vector store, eval suite, guard-rails. Question-to-question matching against a bank of pre-mapped questions rather than searching raw content: it limits the chatbot nature but keeps the answers accurate. Content and tone of voice his own. | Live January 2026. Linked from every CV with a UTM tag per employer so each application's traffic is visible. Pinned on LinkedIn. | 2026 | AI, GenAI, regulated, compliance, prototyping, team leadership |
| Solo projects, building with AI | kittenpm.com kittenpm.com, a free browser-based product management training SIM inspired by Lemmings | Wanted a portfolio piece that is not a portfolio, aimed at product peers and recruiters. | Generate reach and demonstrate product skills by teaching product trade-offs as a game. | Built with React, TypeScript and Phaser, using Claude as the engineering team. Players practise balancing product trade-offs in real time; those who complete the game get a digital certificate to embed on LinkedIn, which drives further reach. | Live July 2026, in public beta. | 2026 | AI, GenAI, regulated, compliance, prototyping, team leadership |
| Solo projects, building with AI | deathspiralorgoldenage.org deathspiralorgoldenage.org, a weekly public poll, live sentiment tracker and open economic model on AI's economic impact, with CC0 data | A thought experiment that spun out from a discussion at a Claude meetup with Anthropic. | Build a public, open-data way to track the question over time. | Researched and built with AI. Content is human; the site is engineered and researched with AI. Weekly poll, sentiment tracker and an open economic model, all data released CC0. | Live September 2026. | 2026 | AI, GenAI, regulated, compliance, prototyping, experimentation, team leadership |
| Co-founder, TextualHealing.com | TextualHealing.com TextualHealing.com, mobile barcode tickets and coupons via MMS | Fresh out of university as the dot.com bubble popped and there were no jobs. The idea was good; the founders were far too early and lacked experience. | Launch a multi-sided marketplace for mobile tickets. | Wanted perfect and kept polishing instead of shipping. No go-to-market plan and no viable first iteration. | Never launched. Years later a CEO's motto, "launch crap, but launch", completed the lesson: ship in small viable increments to capture value and learn early, but never ship junk; to learn fast, run a test. | 2002 - 2004 | pharma, growth, SEO, launch, marketing, web hosting, remote, international, partnerships |
| 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 | 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 |