T-Mobile Web Experience Elevation
Role: Sr. Manager, Product Design
Timeline: 2024-2025
Visibility: Password protected
The short version
My boss handed me a two-sentence ask to take over the web surface. The web had been under-resourced for two years while most of the org focused on the app. Six months later, we had a cross-team design culture running, a web toolkit shipped, a principal designer defining what web could become — and design had earned a seat with Marketing on the t-mobile.com homepage redesign.
No playbook existed. I built one.
The situation
T-Mobile’s web experience was inconsistent. Different teams owned different parts of it, nobody owned the quality bar across all of them, and the work showed it. Components were fragmented. Standards didn’t exist. Web wasn’t anyone’s priority — and it hadn’t been for roughly two years.
I noticed the gap before anyone asked me to fix it. Then my boss asked me to fix it.
What I built
A cross-team design crit with teeth
I pulled together 6 principals spanning every team that touched web — Foundations, Design Systems, Commerce, T-Mobile for Business, Frontline/Assisted, and Service. I brought them in as bar-raisers first: set expectations with them, got them bought in, and used their involvement to set the standard for everyone else. We ran weekly crits with 100% designer participation. Designers signed up to share work and got real feedback from people who knew the standard.
This created a cross-functional accountability structure that didn’t exist before.
Standards and governance
I defined a new role — Principal of Web Governance — and partnered with that person and the design system team to audit what was missing. We built a plan to standardize components and create documentation teams could actually work from. Within 90 days we shipped v1 of the web toolkit, added 15 new and refined components to the design system backlog, and applied standardized responsive breakpoints to 100% of new web designs.
A vision for what web could be
I hired a Principal Designer with a specific mandate: define what this surface should become. In his first month, he established the web design principles the whole surface would work from. That work grew into a full prospect journey vision and a global nav redesign built to scale with new products and AI-driven entry points without needing to be rebuilt every time.
What it unlocked
The vision work got the attention of my VP. Not just awareness — genuine involvement. That led to design earning a seat with Marketing on the t-mobile.com homepage redesign, a project that was actively in progress when I was laid off.
Design went from the surface nobody owned to the room where the homepage was being decided.
What I’d do differently
I’d push earlier for explicit alignment on what “elevated web” looked like at the exec level. The work earned credibility organically, which was real — but clearer success criteria up front would have accelerated the timeline and made the case easier to make as we went.
My direct contribution
I didn’t just hire for this and step back. I defined the crit structure, recruited the principals personally, set the bar for what good feedback looked like, and stayed close enough to the vision work to know it was the best design work of my T-Mobile tenure. When my VP saw it, I was in the room to speak to it.