ways of working: 21 proof points
Rows on the facts page whose own text or source section carries "ways of working". 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 | 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 | 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 |
| 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 | 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 |