T-Mobile — Design Across the Stack

Overview

My initial task was joining a small, lean team as a UX designer to build out an easy-to-use platform for RF engineers under T-mobile’s new initiative Veloce. The core design challenge was clear from day one: how do we introduce complex, technical information in a way that actually serves the people who need it?

That question: “how do we make the opaque transparent?” became the north star that extended across every engagement that followed. As our responsibilities naturally grew from UX design into user research, pitch videos, and org branding, the problem remained consistent: removing the obstacles between T-Mobile's most critical products, insights, and decisions and the executives empowered to act on them.

Systems

RF engineers operate in some of the most information-dense environments in telecom. Before a single deployment could be pushed to production, engineers needed to weigh:

• Cost
• Coverage range
• Technology compatibility
• Geographic constraints

All of this lived across disconnected spreadsheets with no unified view. Our job was to bring it into one place without losing the precision engineers depended on.

Collaborating between Engineers and Designers

Working closely with our engineering lead as product owner, we anchored the product around a mapping platform. Spatial context was the first thing engineers reached for, everything else made more sense once it was grounded in location. From there, a layering system became the core interaction model, letting engineers compare and filter deployments against each other without losing the broader picture.

Adapting Systems

Direct feedback from engineers surfaced gaps we hadn't anticipated:

• Additional data types
• New layer sets
• A manage maps feature that hadn't been scoped initially

Ownership

Scott (Sr. Designer) and I split ownership across the product. I took the dashboard and the icon and logo sets, Scott owned the layers system within the maps. We collaborated closely throughout, sharing feedback and design decisions across both areas.

UX Results

The result was a product that replaced the density of raw data with a visual language engineers could actually reason with, not simplifying the information, but giving it a form that made decision making faster and more defensible.

People

Large organizations move fast at the top and slow at the edges. At T-Mobile, decisions made at the executive level didn't always land cleanly with the teams responsible for executing them, and the friction that created wasn't always visible to the people making those decisions.

We ran two separate research engagements to address this, each with a different team and a different end goal.

Research Project 1

Research 1 focused on a field engineering and operations team that had recently begun working together. Our objectives were straightforward: understand each member's daily role, surface their individual story and value-add, clarify goals and business targets, and identify where silos were forming.

Unifying the Narrative

We interviewed every member individually. What made the process revealing was that in talking about their own work, each person inevitably brought up their colleagues, how they collaborated, where things broke down, what they wished the other side understood. We used that to map relationships and dependencies that wouldn't have surfaced through surveys or group sessions. The goal was always cross-collaboration, and pulling those threads out of individual conversations let us build the collective story from the ground up.

The Output

The output was a thorough deck cataloging each member in detail — their context, pain points, and role within the team — alongside a unified narrative about how the group functioned and where it needed support.

Research Project 2

Research 2 had similar investigative methods but a higher-stakes output. Following a reorganization, a new executive group called IES (Insights, Enablement and Strategy) had been formed to drive data insights and strategy across T-Mobile. They needed more than a research report. They needed an identity.

Distilling the Findings

From our interviews we distilled everything down to three strategic buckets:

• Strategic Focus — one version of truth, clear execution, no wasted effort or duplicated work.
• Horizontal Orchestration — clear ownership across the group, no dual accountability, no infighting. Everyone understands their lane and how it connects to the others.
• Scaling for Impact — by executing the first two, the group could grow the scale of the problems they were solving and deliver increasingly larger outcomes.

Identity Chain

The underlying logic was a chain: data leads to governance, governance creates discipline, discipline enables predictable execution. These three buckets became the principle foundation for the messaging architecture, brand guidelines, and logo lockup we created for IES, giving a newly formed group a clear, unified identity to operate under.

Products

The people building a product are always too close to it. They see the micro — the specific engineering problem, the workflow gap, the feature their team has been waiting for. Executives see the macro, budget, scale, business impact. The disconnect between those two perspectives is where most internal product pitches fail.

Our job was to reframe these products as business solutions, not engineering solutions.

Bridging Narrative to Production

For each video we produced, we started by speaking directly to the product owners to understand what they wanted to highlight. From there we contextualized each product around its use case, not from the engineer's perspective, but from the perspective of someone asking whether this is worth investing in. We made sure the problems being solved weren't presented as personal or team-level friction, but as cascading business issues with real cost.

Building the Structure

Every video followed the same narrative architecture: establish the problem, spotlight the specific product capabilities that address it, then close by tying the outcome back to the opening. Short, focused, and built around what an executive actually needs to make a decision.

Fostering Input

That framework was tested regularly. Product owners had strong opinions about duration and feature coverage, understandably, given how much work sat behind each product. We used storyboards as a negotiation tool, walking stakeholders through the proposed flow visually and identifying where their instincts would work against the audience before offering alternatives. Most of the time we found middle ground, but always in service of keeping the spotlight on value rather than detail.

Outcomes

Delivered multiple videos across the product suite

Scope expanded from a single overview to 5 individual product videos to an executive hero reel

LESA hero reel presented to C-suite including CTOs and SVPs

Continued scope expansion was the signal the work was landing

Capping off.

While the users changed, from RF engineers navigating dense deployment data to executives making organization-wide decisions, the problem never did. The work was always about removing the obstacles between people and the information they needed to move forward.

What working across this breadth of problems makes clear is that products don't exist in isolation. They exist in an ecosystem. The issues an engineering team faces at the ground level cascade upward, and the decisions executives make cascade downward. A designer who can see both ends of that chain, and translate between them, isn't just executing deliverables. They're holding the collective story together.

That's the lens we brought to every engagement at T-Mobile. And it's the one we carry forward.