Newcastle University

Product Manager at Facebook Reality Labs

I lead Product for ShopAR, where we are building the e-commerce foundation for the Metaverse. We provide brands and retailers with 3D 'digital twins' of their products enabling them to automate content creation for e-commerce, marketing and social as well as changing the way consumers shop online via real time 3D and Augmented Reality.

ShopAR

Product Director

As someone who spent 5 years in big tech, getting back to building products directly and learning new skills in the process has been an exhilarating process.

I have picked up new coding skills, spent time learning about AI, energy and fungi. However, research is only a part of learning, and I wanted to make sure I continued to be practitioner. So, I created an AI backed product for teachers: Reportify (reportify.uk) . Standing on the shoulders of some fantastic tech providers, I coded all of Reportify myself. It has already grown beyond my expectations, getting its first paid subscribers only days after launching and it's been growing ever since.

Solo

Solo entrepreneur

I led a team of 5 PMs through a turbulent period of change including major strategic changes and layoffs. Helping them adjust rapidly and continue to produce impactful work.

I formed and led AR Ecosystem PM for AR Software. This group was responsible for building an engaged community of hundreds of thousands of creators and developers across Meta's AR Glasses and Meta Spark . This included publishing, integrity, safety and policy, security, external websites & docs as well as growth across the platform.

PM Manager, AR Platform

Senior PM developing the overarching strategy for the Cross Meta Customer Support Org (circa 125 engineers + cross functional support). I was the third person to join the team and I led it through its trickiest decisions and spearheaded the creation and implementation the org's strategy.

At the same time, I was also the Manager of two Rotational Product Managers and had day to day responsibility for running Cross Meta Support's Data & Measurement team.

The orgs strategy had three prongs:

Issues: Get the highest priority support issues under control - starting with helping people locked out of their FB and IG accounts.
Audiences: Identify and support critical audiences -- starting with creators and advertisers.
Platform: Build and scale the universal support platform for Meta: a reliable, scalable, chat-first, enterprise-class customer support platform handling tens of thousands of agents, and hundreds of thousands of cases a week.

Lead Product Manager & PM Manager, Central Customer Support

I left the startup world to take on the enormous challenge, alongside a world class team, of making Augmented Reality into everyday technology. Our job was to work out if AR could be a part of bringing the world closer together and build communities via Meta's products.

Over 4 years, I worked on almost every part of the AR platform known publicly as Spark. We went from almost nobody using AR, to over a billion people using it and it being a mainstay of Meta's products including, Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, Ads and AR Glasses.

AR Engine & Studio - Building the foundational graphics pipelines and authoring tools for Spark and AR at Meta. We built Visual Shaders, Code Shaders (including a new cross platform shading language SparkSL), interfaces for particles, lighting, SDFs, 3D objects and much more. Our tools enabled the creation of the platform's breakout content, with hundreds of millions of uses.

AR Hub - Meta's central place for Creators to publish and manage AR content. We built new tools for publishing, communications, insights, learning and incentives for creators scaling from a few hundred effects a day to tens of thousands.

AR Integrity - Founded Meta's first AR focused integrity effort. Build the entire system end to end including AI detection (in fact even AI that monitored the AI), human operations and tooling, and all of the interfaces to creators. We were responsible for making sure AR content on Meta products was safe and achieved some of the best results for this type of work in the whole company.

Lead Product Manager, Augmented Reality - Spark

After working on my own startup, I wanted to stay in the startup world but doing something different. Founders Factory is an incubator and accelerator and I worked as an in-house PM creating new businesses for the incubator and advising the accelerator companies.

During my time there I founded an education business called AirSupply. I built the team (including hiring its CEO), product, and first customers. Secured seed funding and had it spun of Founders Factory as an independent business.

Also supported a range of Founders Factory accelerator investments with Product Management guidance.

Founders Factory Ltd

Product Manager

Flexi was a platform (Web, iOS and Android) enabling anyone to discover fitness classes that suit them and instantly book without a membership. We had over 3,000 classes a week in London when it was acquired in 2107.

This was my first foray into creating my own business. Alongside my co-founder, we built Flexi from scratch, developed product strategy, built the product (I learned how to code), fostered partnerships with fitness providers, ran our marketing campaigns and even secured funding (although we didn't take it in the end).

I learned a huge amount about creating a startup, marketplaces, the challenges of getting new things off the ground and how the world of fitness, and how people approach exercise.

Flexi

Co-Founder

I joined Educate Services as the third employee. At the time the business had a sense of what it was going to provide, and some strong backers, but no proven products. I helped Educate's build all of its products and took on whatever was needed of me as we grew the business.

The first focused on supporting schools to spend money more effectively. This was an exciting bootstrapped project where we started by doing everything by hand and then layering tech on top. We saved schools across the UK hundreds of thousands of pounds and put the control of contracts into their hands, rather than their suppliers.

The second was supporting a business we had acquired that helped schools with staff performance management to be converted into a web app. We built technology, a field sales team and marketing efforts. Now used by thousands of schools in UK and across the world.

The third was supporting the opening of new schools, I wrote bids to the Department of Education and Project Managed the creation of new schools. An amazing experience seeing new schools come to life.

Tom Goldsmith