Tom Cavill
Product designer
Independent software product designer
Previously led design at Supercritical, Heygo, Facebook and others; co-founded Bricklane
Independent software product designer
Previously led design at Supercritical, Heygo, Facebook and others; co-founded Bricklane
Supercritical is one of the world's leading carbon removal marketplaces. I led the creation of the software platform from 0–1, from discovery to iteration; and it is now used by some of the world's largest enterprises. With Annabel Lake, Guy Moorhouse and Tom Rainford.
As design director, I oversaw Supercritical's brand evolution, working with talented designers like Aimee Randall, Guy Moorhouse, and Simon Whybray.
One of my proudest achievements at Supercritical was taking a process that once needed months of back-and-forth negotiations and making it as simple as buying a flight — creating one of the first true end-to-end online purchase flows for CDR.
I designed and branded the Supercritical Climate 100 campaign as a rallying point for UK tech companies to measure, celebrate and accelerate their climate impact.
The product showcased leaders in the space, but made progress feel accessible by outlining five achievable steps for any company to climb the rankings. It launched with TechCrunch as a high-visibility moment for the industry, positioning climate action as something aspirational and within reach.
After hundreds of hours listening to climate buyers on discovery calls, I built the Customer Dæmon so anyone in the company could query that insight instantly, rather than relying on me as a bottleneck.
I also spearheaded the adoption of AI internally, running company-wide AI hackdays, and designing AI-driven internal tooling to dramatically reduce time to evaluate nascent projects.
Questionable is an iOS trivia app providing a daily set of general knowledge questions.
I designed and built the app, plus a web service sharing mechanic which brings new players to the game. A fact bank generation pipeline collects verified source facts, then an LLM turns them into templated multiple-choice questions with plausible distractors, and allows for manual QA before going live.
Knowall invites users to "reclaim the rabbit hole" by going deeper on the book, show, or movie they just finished. I designed the app and brand; and various LLM-driven workflows that gives the media its suggested reading list. Users can suggest their own media; and authors can promote their work by sharing associated reading lists on the platform.
I co-founded the fintech Bricklane and led design and product for six years, shaping the visual brand and building multiple generations of consumer apps and internal tooling; now used to process hundreds of millions of pounds in property transactions each year. I also drove product partnerships with Zoopla, Revolut, Monzo and others for distribution. With Simon Whybray, James Shedden, and Martina Dawidowska.
Heygo was a virtual travel startup which raised $20m. I built its design function from the ground up — spanning product and creative — hiring a small, high-output team and contributing hands-on as an IC to ship high-quality work at speed.
As part of the leadership team I helped shape strategy and operations, while delivering major web and native app redesigns that improved conversion and retention. I also redesigned the Postcard feature, which generated more than 17 million user-created photos. With Florian Bölter, Jackie Zhang and Marie McDermott.
At Meta (Facebook), I led design at Spark AR. I designed a scalable system that surfaced actions that could be taken by Creators on a given Effect, drawn from their usage data.
When presenting my work to design leadership they said it “set the gold standard” for how new features should be designed at Facebook.
Peeps was an iOS app I created. It was featured in the App Store and gained over 10,000 users organically, in part down to an innovative sharing feature which let users send videos to friends who didn't yet have the app. I designed the app and built the web services in Express JS. iOS development by Alex Edge.
When I went freelance, I built a design-job board aggregator that pushed openings into a single Twitter feed so I could track roles easily. It grew to 4,000+ followers organically, so I spun up a companion site that generated steady revenue from job posts with essentially zero maintenance.