Case Summary
Rogers and Fido customers moved between billing, payments, data usage and account tools owned by separate teams. I saw an opportunity to connect those experiences through a shared view of the customer journey.
As Senior Manager, Product Design, I led 12 designers and introduced shared intake, prioritization, research and reviews, with senior designers owning individual workstreams.
Moving research earlier helped the team define customer problems before designing solutions and coordinate decisions across web, apps and service tools.
Prototype testing recorded participant-reported ease-of-use ratings of 8/10 for mobile usage and 4.6/5 for the digital bill. Across the wider programme, self-serve handled 99% of payments, and payment-related calls fell 23% year over year.
Portfolio Mandate
I began this work as UX Manager and became Senior Manager, Product Design in March 2020. I coordinated design across the self-serve portfolio, managing intake, team allocation and priorities while commissioning research, approving design direction, hiring and coaching designers.
I worked with Product, Research and Design leadership on portfolio planning and strategy, while keeping day-to-day delivery moving across the team. Directors and senior directors were part of the regular operating rhythm, with vice-presidents joining the major initiatives.
Business and Customer Challenge
Self-serve was the primary way customers managed their relationship with Rogers. Billing, payments, data usage, account overview, identity and support each had separate product owners, delivery pressures and measures of success. A decision that made sense within one touchpoint could still make the wider journey harder to understand.
The consequences went beyond usability. When customers could not interpret a bill change, understand their data status or complete a payment with confidence, they turned to care channels. At times, care and retail teams competed with digital self-serve rather than reinforcing it, drawing customers into assisted channels or prioritizing local objectives over digital adoption. Shifting priorities and reorganizations made it harder for teams to maintain a consistent view of the customer experience.
Leadership Strategy
I focused on three changes: use customer journeys to connect product decisions, bring research into the work before solutions were defined, and give designers clear ownership within a shared planning and review process.
Organize around customer journeys
I used journey maps and shared working sessions to show how customers moved across separately owned touchpoints. This gave teams a common frame for decisions and clarified where customers needed orientation, explanation or action.
Move research upstream
The team had often used research to validate screens after design had begun. I secured support for generative research earlier in the process, so we could understand customer behaviour, mental models and pain points before committing to a solution. Researchers led the studies; I translated the findings into portfolio priorities and design direction.
Establish shared ways of working
I introduced processes for intake, prioritization and design review. Senior designers owned their day-to-day workstreams, while I balanced requests against customer evidence, business priorities and team capacity. Reviews focused on the broader journey and the consequences of decisions across brands and touchpoints.
Together, these changes began to shift how Product, Research and Design partners worked together. Customer journeys and shared evidence gave teams a common basis for planning, made dependencies visible earlier and helped resolve trade-offs beyond individual touchpoints. The result was less siloed decision-making across the portfolio.
How I Led
Delegate with clear accountability
I structured the team around the portfolio’s main customer journeys and workstreams. Each major stream had a senior designer who worked directly with its product manager and delivery team. I set the portfolio direction, connected their work through shared reviews and research, and stepped into detailed decisions when they affected multiple journeys or brands.
Coach for influence, not just craft
Strong collaboration was a core leadership principle. One of the team’s strongest designers had high standards but could dominate discussions and dismiss other perspectives. I coached him on listening, collaboration and the effect of his behaviour on the team. He became a stronger partner and was later promoted into one of the organization’s most senior individual-contributor roles.
Use delivery friction to improve the system
When a component change was rejected by the design system team, I worked through their process to understand the constraint firsthand. I then used that experience to show how governance was slowing product teams and limiting contribution. This helped shift the conversation toward a more collaborative model.
Create stability through change
Reorganizations and shifting priorities were a constant part of the work. I kept the team focused on the customer problems with the greatest portfolio impact, clarified priorities as reporting lines changed, and maintained close communication with Product, Research and Design leadership.
Portfolio in Action
The portfolio strategy took shape through connected initiatives. Each addressed a distinct customer problem while strengthening the team’s ability to work across journeys.
Data Manager: an early foundation
As a designer on the original 2016 Data Manager initiative, I developed a detailed understanding of the data usage experience and the value of self-serve tools that help customers act before a problem escalates. Rogers reported 85,000 activations in the first two weeks after launch. That experience later informed my leadership of the mobile usage redesign.
Mobile Usage Redesign: establishing generative research
Speed Pass was a high-stakes project that let customers purchase additional data before incurring overage fees. It required an experience that helped customers understand their usage status and make an informed decision at the right time. Because the work involved redesigning the full usage lifecycle, rather than refining a single screen, I proposed generative research as the best way to understand how customers monitored, interpreted and responded to their data use.
I secured stakeholder support and led five designers as they translated the findings into a three-state model across desktop, mobile web and the Rogers app: on track, approaching risk or action needed.
The experience gave customers a clearer view of their status and made the relevant next action more visible. In pre-launch prototype testing, participants rated it 8/10 for ease of use. It also established a repeatable approach to defining the problem before designing the solution.
Billing and Payments: connecting four product teams
Research showed that customers experienced billing notifications, account overview, the digital bill and payment as one financial journey, even though separate product teams planned and designed each touchpoint. I brought the evidence together through journey mapping and a workshop, then presented the connected opportunity to the senior director responsible for those product groups.
Five designers on my team worked across the touchpoints with separate product managers. I coordinated the work as one cross-functional effort and reviewed decisions against a shared journey. A customer habit—comparing the current balance with the previous cycle—became the organizing principle for explanation, hierarchy and payment access throughout the experience.
Compounding Outcomes
Across connected releases from May 2019 through Q3 2021, the self-serve experience became easier to understand, more capable of resolving common needs and more central to how customers managed their accounts.
Mobile usage: In pre-launch prototype testing, participants rated the redesigned mobile usage experience 8/10 for ease of use.
Billing and payments: In prototype testing, participants gave the redesigned digital bill an average 4.6/5 ease-of-use rating. By March 2021, 99% of payments were completed through self-serve, while Rogers and Fido billing CSAT exceeded their respective targets.
Care-channel demand: Rogers later reported 23% fewer payment-related calls year over year as automated notifications and auto-pay adoption expanded.
The portfolio work also informed an internal business case projecting $20–30M in annual cost avoidance through reduced billing and account-related care contacts. This was an internal projection used to frame the scale of the opportunity and support continued investment in self-serve.
What Changed
The lasting result was a stronger Design practice within the self-serve portfolio. Senior designers had clear ownership of their workstreams; intermediate designers had coaching, review and research support; and Product teams had a consistent way to bring new work into the portfolio.
Research moved upstream, and journey mapping gave teams and stakeholders a shared view of how independently owned touchpoints contributed to one customer relationship. Planning conversations shifted from individual feature requests to customer journeys, making dependencies, priorities and trade-offs more visible across Product, Research and Design.
The work established a more durable way to manage a connected customer experience: give teams ownership of their work, ground decisions in customer evidence and maintain a view across the whole journey.
Evidence and Attribution
Portfolio metrics are drawn from Rogers UX research, the March 2021 Digital Billing and Payments KPI report and public Rogers investor reporting. The ease-of-use ratings are participant-reported results from prototype testing; the mobile usage test took place before launch. The 2016 Data Manager activation figure comes from Rogers’ Q3 2016 earnings transcript. The $20 to $30 million annual cost-avoidance figure was an internal projection presented to leadership. Company-level outcomes are presented as portfolio context or contributing evidence unless a study directly evaluated the experience.