discovery: 19 proof points
Rows on the facts page whose own text or source section carries "discovery". The product name links the page with the full text. All skills.
| 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 | 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 |
| Senior Product Manager at Novo Nordisk | Wegovycare Wegovycare weight-loss prediction model | Patient research showed everyone wanted the same three things: how much weight they will lose, whether this is normal, whether they are on track. Nothing in the brief answered them. | Make those three questions the core loop of the product, and find the growth lever inside them. | Built a weight-loss prediction model answering the first question: a predicted trajectory for the individual to check progress against. Started as an Excel spreadsheet on a laptop; the maths worked out with the strongest backend engineer, then taken from concept to prototype. The same check-ins fed the profiling engine. | Patients could see whether they were on track against their own projection. The model was later spun out as a Bayesian API service, a product in its own right, and the team extended it from weight to HbA1c. | 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 |
| 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 | GenAI proof of concept for automating compliance reviews Agentic RAG proof of concept for compliance reviews, with a Figma plugin | Every release of health software needed sign-off from medical, legal and regulatory reviewers. The process was built for marketing materials, not software: every screen was manually captured as a PDF and reviewed manually, stacking the regulatory risk to the end of the development cycle and sometimes adding months to delivery. | Test whether an LLM could take on the review so product teams could shift left: fail in design, not at review. Two acceptance tests set up front: useful to product teams, and catches what the manual review catches. | Used an internal LLM sandbox to build a RAG model of the guidelines and regulations, producing a full audit trail per submission. Built a prototype agent that plugged into Figma so designers could query the guidelines before investing effort. Pitched it to senior leadership & tested with product team. | Product team loved it. The proof of concept showed a clear path to much faster release cycles, but the timing was 12 months too early & the business was not ready for AI. Tom moved to help the Wegovy Pill launch. | Feb 2022 - Feb 2026 | AI, GenAI, regulated, compliance, pharma, healthcare, discovery, prototyping, ways of working, launch, marketing, team leadership, stakeholders |
| 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 |
| 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 profiling and customisation engine, delivered as an interactive magazine | Research showed every patient journey is different and every patient has different needs. A linear app would not work, and the drop-off risks were different for each person. | Identify each patient's drop-off risks and act on them automatically, with a system that coped with real people who do not check in on schedule. | Tom's own idea and pattern, most of the algorithm his. Built a continuous profiling engine combining clinical data, usage signals and PROMs. Applied a consumer marketing playbook to act on the top risk: it decided what content was shown and could trigger a messaging flow. Ran on fuzzy logic, tolerating gaps and misuse. Output to the patient: an interactive magazine that changed with them. | Every patient got a personalised experience from one product and one codebase. Part of the launch that reached 10% adoption in the first market and became the fastest-scaling digital product at Novo. | Mar 2020 - Feb 2022 | algorithm, API, regulated, pharma, healthcare, patients, discovery, prototyping, ways of working, growth, retention, roadmap, launch, 0 to 1, marketing, team leadership, stakeholders, consumer |
| 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 |
| 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 | 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 | 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 |
| Senior Product Manager at Novo Nordisk | Wegovycare releases Wegovycare release process | Release cycles for digital products at Novo were yearly. Every release carried heavy documentation for a high-regulation environment, and the documentation was written by hand. | Release often enough to learn from patients, inside the same regulatory rules. | Automated the documentation and the release workflows so the compliance paperwork fell out of the build rather than being written afterwards. | Release cycles went from yearly to bi-monthly. Fast for pharma. Iterative learning became possible. | Mar 2020 - Feb 2022 | algorithm, API, regulated, compliance, pharma, healthcare, patients, discovery, prototyping, ways of working, growth, retention, roadmap, 0 to 1, marketing, team leadership, stakeholders, consumer |
| Senior Product Manager at Novo Nordisk | Wegovycare roadmap Wegovycare roadmap | A project-model organisation steered by deliverables and dates. Nobody on the product had a way of saying what mattered next, or why. | Own the product vision and the backlog, and steer priorities by what patients did and said rather than by the plan. | Set the vision. Implemented OKRs, as in every product, else how do you know you have succeeded. Owned the backlog end to end: problem statements, user stories, acceptance criteria, sprint-by-sprint prioritisation with a cross-functional team of 10. Steered priorities and the roadmap with qualitative and quantitative signals together, patient interviews beside usage data. | A roadmap that traced back to patient evidence and a definition of success the stakeholders had agreed up front. The product hit 10% adoption in its first market against that definition. | 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 |
| 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 |