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Case Study · T-Mobile · Confidential
Role
Sr. Manager, Product Design
Timeline
6 months
Year
2023–2024
Web was T-Mobile's forgotten surface. The app had all the attention. Web was inconsistent, under-resourced, and nobody owned the quality bar across teams. That had been the state for roughly two years.
Nobody assigned this to me. Several managers, including me, each owned a piece of the web, which meant the fragmentation was everyone's problem and no one's responsibility. I kept bringing evidence of that to my VP until she asked me to take the whole thing on. There was no scope or playbook attached to it, so I built one.
The mandate
"Elevate the craft, consistency, and quality of all web design work — ensuring our web presence reflects the strength of our brand."
Build accountability
Rally the right principals to set the bar before asking anyone else to meet it.
Create standards + governance
Give teams a toolkit and a quality bar they could actually work from.
Define the vision
Hire for what web could become — not just what it was.
Part one
Built a group of 7 principals across 6 teams: Foundations, Design Systems, Commerce, T-Mobile for Business, Frontline/Assisted, and Service.
We ran a weekly web design crit — principal-led, open to all designers across teams. No one had created cross-team accountability on the web surface before. We did.
7
principals aligned
6
product teams
Part two
Web Governance role
Created a new Principal of Web Governance + IA role — owning standards, components, and information architecture across the surface.
v1 Web Toolkit
Shipped within 90 days of kickoff. 15 new and refined components added to the design system. A starter set that gave every team a shared foundation.
Responsive standards
Standardized responsive breakpoints — mobile, tablet, desktop, large desktop — applied to 100% of all new web designs.
Global nav redesign
Built alignment across Business, Product, and Marketing on a navigation system that could scale with new products and AI-driven entry points.
Part three
Brought in Vidal Men with a specific mandate: define what web could be, not what it was.
Month one: established the web design principles the entire surface should work from. Evolved into a research-grounded, stakeholder-aligned prospect journey vision — used as the north star for future web investments.
The mandate
Define what T-Mobile web could become.
Month one
Web design principles established for the entire surface.
The outcome
A research-grounded prospect journey vision used as the north star for future investments.
What it unlocked
01
VP attention
Vidal's vision work got the attention of my VP — design was no longer just executing, it was leading the conversation.
02
A seat at the table
Design earned a seat with Marketing to lead the t-mobile.com homepage redesign. The most visible web surface in the company.
03
The tiger team
That led to a formal Web Vision Tiger Team: 6-week sprints, 4 flagship web experiences, weekly VP reviews, multi-brand scope across T-Mobile, Mint, and Metro.
"Web was the forgotten surface. I turned it into the most ambitious design initiative of my T-Mobile tenure."
Craft, culture, and momentum — in six months.
90
days to ship the v1 Web Toolkit from kickoff
100%
designer participation in weekly cross-team web crits
6 mo
from an unassigned problem to VP involvement and a homepage redesign seat