About

Hi, I’m Tom.

I’m a Staff Product Designer at Calendly, where I’m the only designer on the iOS and Android apps. I’ve spent ten years designing consumer and SaaS products end to end.

I’m a digital native. I remember the piercing tones of dial-up, watched the internet rise, and built my own computer. Changing technology has been a constant in my life. I think of myself as a device thinker: I care about bringing a product’s value to the many devices and tools people work from, instead of being tied to one platform.

Why I became a designer

As a child I loved things that were complex and esoteric, and what were computers in the 1990s if not that? I enjoyed being the only person I knew who had their own website when I was 13.

I also loved solving problems and helping people. I studied psychology and sociology at Kalamazoo College, and after graduating I followed that interest into sleep research at the University of Michigan. Then I was put in charge of our lab’s databases. I built them with safeguards for nervous users, and I realized pretty quickly that I was getting more out of designing tools that saved people time than out of what my actual job was supposed to be.

That led to a Master’s in Human-Computer Interaction at Michigan, where I also taught Python and intro web design as a graduate student instructor. I hand-coded my portfolio in HTML and CSS for years before moving to Figma. This site is a return to that: I built it by hand, with Claude Code.

Tom at a whiteboard covered in sketches, pointing to one as he explains an idea.

My design perspective

You can’t call a design good without knowing the problem it’s trying to solve, so research usually comes first. A few principles keep showing up in my work:

Be persistent. At Calendly, I made the case for a new mobile direction twice: first to the CEO, then again to a new CPO after the people who approved it had left. We shipped it, and mobile went from predicting churn to predicting retention.
AI has to clear the bar. At Loop Team, people stayed skeptical of AI notes. They wouldn’t give up their own notetaking for something that wasn’t fully reliable. AI only changes behavior once it clears that threshold, so we pointed it where a rough signal still helped.
Show only what matters. At Mojio, context cards appeared only when something needed your attention.
When a standard only lives in my head, build the system. That’s how Calendly’s mobile design system started.

From there I iterate, test with users, ship, see how people respond, and go again.