Tom ReeveOpen to roles

Design × Tech × Product

Designer by trade. Problem solver by instinct. I build the systems, tools and teams that keep problems solved.

Currently

Head of Design and Web at Zyte, a leading B2B SaaS web data extraction company. I own zyte.com end to end, structure, content and conversion, and the UX of the web app, with product ownership of specific areas within it. I'm Product Owner for the squad that ships it: two senior designers, six developers and a QA engineer, measured on two numbers, visitor to paid subscriber and visitor to data service enquiry.

I zoom out before I zoom in. Given a problem, my first question is what class of problem it belongs to and what would make it stop recurring. Sometimes the answer is a design. Sometimes it's a platform, a pipeline, or the way a team decides.

Still hands-on, and intend to stay that way. The 5 projects below are ones I designed and built, not ones I supervised.

Selected work

5 case studies

homepage-redesign.protozyte.com

Projects/homepage-redesign

$ claude

> ▌

Protozyte · Internal AI prototyping platform

Systems · AI · Platform

Prototyping went from a bottleneck to self-serve. Ideas tested in days instead of sprints, with no engineering time per prototype.

Operating model · Team as a system

Decisions moved to the people doing the work, with the minimum structure that made that safe.

insights.zyte.internal

The consolidated analytics dashboard, showing signals across sources

Product intelligence · Data to decisions

Six fractured sources into one model, then taught to find the problems itself.

Extract Summit · Rebrand in a weekend

One-line brief, immovable date. Brand, assets and site front end designed in a weekend, live in two weeks.

app.zyte.com/data-services

The Data Services dashboard, showing active feeds and recent activity

Zyte Data Services · Managed service to self-serve product

Product · Platform · B2B

A service delivered by email became a product clients run themselves. Time to data fell from 30 days to one, and churn dropped 84%.

Raising the floor

Four years building with AI. The useful part was never prompting. It's knowing what to build so other people can move fast without breaking things.

01
Tools, not prompts
Protozyte, the site audit pipeline, the insight engine. Each one solves a class of problem once, for everyone, instead of me solving instances faster than I used to.
02
Paved paths, not Frankensteins
On-brand by default, so a prototype built by a marketer still looks like our product. If the system encodes what good looks like, more people can build without the output fragmenting.
03
The judgment stays human
AI scores the pages, clusters the friction, drafts the summaries. It doesn't set priorities, own the message, or review people. Toil is automatable; accountability isn't.
04
Craft sets the ceiling
AI raises the floor of what anyone can produce. It doesn't raise the top. That's why great design got scarcer, not less valuable, and why I'm still hands-on in the work.

Experience

Fifteen years moving between design, development and product. The titles changed; the job never really did.

2023 → Present
Head of Design and Web · Zyte
Product Owner for the web squad: two senior product designers, six developers and a QA engineer, with a dotted line into SEO and blog content. End-to-end ownership of the website covering structure, content and conversion, accountable for visitor to paid subscriber and visitor to data service enquiry. I run the strategy and positioning workshops that set direction, present quarterly plans and results to the senior leadership team, and work in the same language as the developers I sit with. Still hands-on in the design, and built the internal AI platforms the team prototypes and prioritises with.
2022 → 2023
Head of Design · Kaizan
Design leadership in an early-stage AI product company. I ran the user research myself, interviews through to synthesis, and translated what came back into product strategy: what to build, what to drop, and why. Set the design direction and design system for the core product, working directly alongside engineering in short cycles.
2017 → 2022
Head of Digital Product · Staysure Group
Joined as a team of one and grew it to 40 designers and developers by the end of my tenure, across three roles in nearly five years. Built the design function from scratch, ran conversion optimisation as a discipline, and led the product decisions behind a multi-brand purchase journey in a high-volume regulated e-commerce business.
- Head of Digital Product2021 → 2022
- Head of UX & Design2019 → 2021
- Senior UX and Development Manager2017 → 2019
2017
Product Designer, freelance · Amsterdam
Contract product design work with a startup in Amsterdam, covering research through to shipped interface.
2014 → 2017
Digital Transformation Lead · University of Northampton
Three roles over two and a half years, ending in leading digital transformation for a large public institution: service design, a rebuilt digital estate, and the difficult work of changing how a slow organisation ships.
- Digital Transformation Lead2016 → 2017
- Digital Services Manager2015 → 2016
- Digital Design Lead2014 → 2015
2009 → 2014
Earlier
Head of Design, Digital Paint · Web Team Lead, Creare · Ecommerce Designer, Shebang Distribution. Agency and in-house work: brand, web build, and the years of production craft everything since has been built on.

Toolkit

DesignFigma, design systems, prototyping, brand and identity

BuildNext.js, TypeScript, Tailwind, shadcn, Docker, Cloudflare

AIClaude Code, LLM APIs, agent workflows, evaluation and cost modelling

ProductJira, Notion, experimentation, BigQuery, analytics instrumentation

Speaking & community

A useful test of an idea: does it survive a room of marketers and a room of developers.

Recent
The Marketing Meetup · speaker
One of the UK's largest marketing communities. Talked on [topic] to an audience of marketers rather than designers, which is a good discipline for stripping jargon out of an argument.
Recent
NN1 Dev Club · speaker and contributor
The UK's biggest developer community. Spoke on [topic], and contributed to the club's own website. Presenting design thinking to a room of engineers is the clearest signal I can give that I work in their language, not at them.
Off the clock
Some people say I'm obsessed with tech
They're right.
Drone flying and aerial photography, 3D modelling and printing, and a homelab I keep expanding past the point of reason. The through line is the same as the work: I like understanding how things fit together, and I learn a technology by building something real with it. More on that here.

Open to Head of Design and senior product roles

If you're building something that needs systems as much as craft, let's talk.

[email protected]LinkedIn GitHub CV