T-Mobile’s navigation hadn’t been looked at from a UX lens in over five years. The company had grown, added new products and business lines, and just kept bolting things on. By 2025 there were eight different navigation patterns depending on where you entered the site. Wireless, prepaid, internet, business — each one its own thing. No single view of T-Mobile as one company.
Nobody asked me to fix it. I just saw it.
I pulled in one of my Principal designers to audit the nav and assess what was actually broken. We built a pitch deck from scratch — problem, user research, analytics, opportunity, projected impact. I brought it to my VP of Design first, then to the VP of Marketing. Both said yes. We got the green light to pursue it and put together concepts for user testing.
Then we re-orged.
The VP who gave us the verbal green light shifted priorities. Funding never locked in. We kept pushing — I stayed aligned with my new director and we both believed it was still worth doing. But the reorg slowed everything down, and I was laid off before we could finish it.
Research did validate the direction. Users across telecom sites consistently expected a single global navigation — and struggled when they didn’t find one. Concepts tested well. The work was real. It just didn’t ship.
What I took from it: don’t wait for someone to hand you a problem to solve. In a large organization, most of the job is executing on someone else’s priorities. This was a chance to create my own initiative and figure out the rest — how work gets funded, who needs to be in the room, how to keep momentum alive through a reorg. I learned more running this unsolicited project than I did on half the things I was officially asked to do.