Tom is passionate about the transformative power of data, but his professional journey didn’t start in the tech world.
“My career pathway is one with a few unanticipated twists and turns,” he says.
Tom earned his bachelor’s degree in environmental science and master’s in urban planning. While attending grad school, he developed a love for visualizing complex data through art and design. He dug deeper into this newfound interest, and those skills helped him land his first job out of school. Now, Tom is the Associate Manager of Design and Informatics at CCC, where he navigates the intersection of data, design, and human experience.
“For me, UX and product design mirror their physical world counterparts like architecture, industrial design, and city planning,” he says.
CCC’s culture prioritizes innovation and collaboration, creating employee experiences that just work—providing the support and opportunities for people like Tom to make an impact. Here, Tom shares why his work brings him joy, how CCC’s supportive culture encouraged his professional growth, and practical advice for those hoping to make a career change.
What led to your job at CCC, and how did you know the company would be a good fit?
Early in my career, I started using Tableau—a visual analytics platform—for data visualization. I built my skills through a public data visualization community where an international group of creators collaborated on visualizing data and sharing ideas, tricks, and skills. A recruiter from CCC found my work and it was a perfect match. I started working for CCC in Business Intelligence, where I was designing best-in-class dashboards and visualization tools. It was a hard choice to leave the world of architectural design, but I knew this was my best chance to make a career change.
What are you responsible for as the Associate Manager of Design and Informatics? What inspires or excites you about this work?
I manage a team of UI and UX designers who handle a wide range of products. I lead our design team in informatics, which is a design field that aims to make complex information and data easy to understand for users. I also lead our mobile product teams. All my work channels and responsibilities share a common theme: helping people. As a designer, my core obligation is to ensure our products are easy to use and valuable. Knowing that what our team builds helps people—whether repairing a car, getting a job done faster, or saving someone money—brings me joy.
You’ve been at CCC for six years. Can you describe your career path? How did CCC support your professional growth and encourage internal mobility?
I haven’t always been in product design. In 2020, two years after joining the company as a business intelligence developer, I started interacting with the CCC design team and discussing common interests and skills. I talked to my director at the time about an emerging opportunity in design and they were supportive and wanted to see me succeed.
When I first transitioned into design, I worried I’d need to play catch-up and learn many new skills. My new leader set me up with projects to grow my skills and gave me the right mixture of training opportunities and stable projects so I could forge my own path. CCC’s environment encourages employees to innovate, which helped me feel confident in exploring new opportunities and finding my own path forward.
What learning and development opportunities are available to employees? Which ones have benefitted you the most?
As a manager, CCC has provided a lot of training to become a quality leader. These courses and classes have set me up for success with my teams. CCC also gives every team a training budget, which we’ve been able to use for growing our skills in emerging trends. Over the past several years, I’ve attended virtual classes with world-class designers and ethnographers to learn about the emerging space of user research. Learning from this different field of work has made our team more flexible and adaptable to the current market needs in user experience design.
The support for continuous learning at CCC enables employees to stay at the forefront of new trends, which is essential for fostering innovation. I feel like I’m always getting the chance to evolve, both as a leader and as a designer.
What’s been the biggest challenge regarding your pivot from the analytics team to the design team? How did you overcome it?
In most organizations, analytics is at the “end of the pipe” so to speak. The last thing built is typically reporting. Products need to generate data to report on it. As a product designer, I’m now at the other end of the pipe. The stakes are a bit higher because products can be anything. Analytics, while still equally as important, have a standard output: data in the form of a dashboard, table, or API. This limits what you can create but reduces the chances of taking the wrong path.
Product design lives in a realm of endless possibility, which can leave one with crippling choice paralysis. Over the years, I’ve developed various tools and facilitation styles for workshops and brainstorming sessions that help sort through the limitless possibilities. There are times when you need to impose constraints, but there are other times when you need to think bigger. Knowing when and how to use these tools is a true skill; you only develop it through trial and error.
CCC’s approach has helped me foster creative solutions and approach challenges with confidence. The freedom to experiment has been a huge benefit in both my personal growth and in shaping the innovative products we create.
What’s one highlight of your career thus far at CCC? How did your team and CCC’s work culture help pave the way for this success?
Every year CCC hosts an internal hackathon that’s open to the technical part of the organization. In 2021, I helped lead a mixture of business intelligence developers, data engineers, data scientists, and product owners on a project. It was one of the first times I truly took on a lead role. Our team worked day and night a few days in a row and delivered an exciting prototype that took first place. I was glad to participate, be part of a great team, and meet many new people. Winning was a nice bonus too.
CCC’s culture made this possible because it encourages collaboration and gives us the space to explore new ideas. That environment really fosters innovation and helped me bring my vision to life.
What does it take to succeed at CCC? As a leader, what qualities or skills do you look for in a design candidate hoping to become a member of your team?
I think it’s a given that every designer in 2024 needs to have basic knowledge of Figma, Adobe products, and other brainstorming tools like Miro. These skills are the foundation. A lot of designers fall into the trap of believing an impressive portfolio is the key to landing a job. I’ve looked at many portfolios and the ones that always impress me the most manage to compress their information into simple, easily digested content. Most designers follow the “case study” method of presentation where work is presented in a familiar format. Here’s the thing—if your portfolio follows the same formula as everyone else, how does that make you stand out? I look for designers who tastefully break the rules and take risks.
I’m also a big fan of people sharing their thoughts on online platforms like Medium. Long-form writing is a great way to showcase storytelling skills and the ability to synthesize complex information into a format that can be easily consumed. Building “screens” is a small portion of what we do and, increasingly, storytelling is an in-demand skill.
What advice do you have for others who are thinking about changing the course of their careers the way you did?
Throughout my career journey, I’ve worked for a landscape architecture firm, an international architecture firm, a public health research grant, the U.S. EPA, a Fortune 500 company, and now CCC. Looking back at those jobs and internships for different organizations, these experiences all speak to my passion for making stuff for people to use. I believe in the principles of the Bauhaus School of Design (the birthplace of modern design), especially in the value of human-centric design.
If you’re passionate about something, you owe it to yourself to take a risk and try something new. Read books (iBauhaus, The Image of the City, The Design of Everyday Things, Meaningful Stuff: Design That Lasts), watch documentaries (bauhausWORLD, Rams, General Magic, The Genius of Design, Objectified), listen to podcasts (99% Invisible, Design Matters) and check out what content creators are making.