Mario CardosoPortfolio Mandate
Rogers and Fido served millions of customers through a large authenticated self-serve portfolio spanning web, mobile apps and internal service tools. By the end of my tenure, I directly managed 12 senior, intermediate and contract designers. The team covered billing, payments, data usage, account overview, identity and a range of care and sales experiences.
My mandate was to ensure that work distributed across brands, product teams and release schedules still resolved into one coherent customer experience. I managed intake and work allocation, set priorities, commissioned research, approved design direction, coached designers, hired new team members and represented UX in planning conversations with Product, Research and design leadership. 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 one of the main ways customers managed their relationship with Rogers. It was also where fragmented ownership became visible. Billing, payments, data usage, account overview and support had different product owners, delivery pressures and measures of success. Each stream could make reasonable local decisions and still create an inconsistent journey when customers moved between them.
The consequences extended beyond usability. Customers called when they could not understand a bill change, interpret their data status or complete a payment with confidence. Those contacts increased service costs and weakened trust in digital channels. The design team needed enough context to solve the underlying customer problems, enough autonomy to move with product teams and enough coordination to keep the portfolio cohesive.
Organizational change added pressure throughout the work. Priorities shifted, teams were reorganized and designers absorbed new areas of responsibility. My role was to reduce that noise for the team, keep our focus on the highest-value customer problems and maintain a consistent standard for design quality.
Leadership Strategy
Organize around journeys
I used customer journeys as the common frame across separately owned product areas. Journey maps and shared working sessions helped designers and product partners see the role of each touchpoint in context. This was especially important when several teams considered their own surface to be the centre of the experience. The journey view clarified where customers needed orientation, explanation and action, giving each team a more precise role.
Move research upstream
The team had often relied on analytics and stakeholder feedback to define a problem, then used research to validate screens after design had begun. I pushed for generative research earlier in the process so we could understand behaviour, mental models and pain points before committing to a solution. I initiated the research questions and secured support for the investment. Researchers planned and conducted the studies, while I connected the findings to portfolio priorities and design direction.
This required trust. Some business partners questioned the time and value of an unfamiliar research approach. I made the case that a stronger understanding of the problem would reduce rework and improve the quality of the decisions that followed. The resulting studies established a precedent for later journey work and gave the team a shared evidence base when stakeholder opinions diverged.
Build a portfolio operating model
I introduced processes for intake, prioritization and design review. Regular stakeholder check-ins gave me visibility into emerging needs, while portfolio planning allowed me to weigh those requests against organizational priorities, research evidence and team capacity. Senior designers were assigned to the main workstreams and acted as day-to-day owners. I controlled intake and work distribution, created the conditions for collaboration across streams and reviewed the resulting experience as a connected whole.
Designers retained authority over most daily design decisions. My reviews focused on the broader vision, the evidence behind the work and the consequences for adjacent journeys. This model gave senior designers meaningful ownership and helped intermediate designers develop judgment without losing coherence across the portfolio.
How I Led
Direction through delegation
Each major stream had an assigned senior designer. Those leads worked closely with their product managers and delivery teams, while I connected their work through shared reviews, common research and portfolio-level planning. I approved the overall direction and stepped into detailed design when a decision carried consequences across multiple surfaces or brands.
Coaching for stronger collaboration
One of the strongest designers on the team had excellent craft and conviction, along with a tendency to dominate discussions and dismiss other perspectives. I coached him on listening, collaboration and the effect his behaviour had on the room. Over time, he became a more effective partner while retaining the standards that made his work strong. He was eventually promoted into one of the most senior individual-contributor roles in the organization.
Improving collaboration beyond my team
I also used delivery friction as evidence for organizational improvement. When I submitted a component change to the design system team, their process rejected the request through a narrow view of system priorities. Working through the process myself made the inefficiency visible. I used that experience to show how protective governance was limiting contribution and slowing product teams, which helped move the system group toward a more collaborative model.
Leading through change
Constant organizational change made stability a management responsibility. I kept designers close to the customer evidence, clarified priorities when reporting lines or stakeholder needs shifted and maintained regular communication with Product, Research and other design leaders. That structure helped the team continue delivering while building the insight needed to improve customer satisfaction over time.
Portfolio in Action
The transformation developed through connected initiatives. Each one addressed a specific customer problem and also strengthened how the portfolio operated.
Data Manager: an early foundation
As a designer on the original 2016 Data Manager programme, I gained detailed knowledge of the data usage experience and the operational value of effective self-serve tools. Rogers reported 85,000 activations during the first two weeks after launch. That context became useful when I later led the mobile usage redesign created by the Speed Pass programme in a management and design-lead capacity.
Mobile Usage Redesign: establishing generative research
Speed Pass was the business programme that allowed customers to purchase additional mobile data before incurring overage fees. Introducing that capability created an opportunity to redesign how customers understood and acted on usage across the billing cycle. I proposed a generative research approach, secured stakeholder support and worked with a researcher to understand how customers monitored, interpreted and responded to data usage. I also contributed design ideas and approved the overall direction developed by the five designers who reported to me.
The team translated the findings into a three-state usage model across desktop, mobile web and the Rogers mobile apps. Customers could quickly understand whether they were on track, approaching risk or needed to act, with the Speed Pass purchase option becoming prominent when additional data was relevant. Post-launch research produced an 8 out of 10 ease-of-use score. The larger organizational outcome was a repeatable model for using research to define the problem space early.
Billing and Payments: orchestrating a connected journey
Research later exposed a strategy gap across email notifications, account overview, the digital bill and payment flows. Customers experienced those surfaces as one financial journey, while the organization planned and designed them through separate product teams. I brought previous studies together through a journey-mapping exercise and a 10-star workshop, then presented the connected opportunity to the senior director responsible for the product groups.
Five designers on my team worked across the touchpoints, partnering with separate product managers. I managed intake, directed the work as one programme and approved the design decisions against a shared journey vision. Research on the customer habit of comparing the current balance with the previous cycle became the organizing principle for explanation, hierarchy and payment access across the experience.
Compounding Outcomes
The outcomes accumulated across connected releases from May 2019 through Q3 2021. Together, they show a digital channel becoming easier to understand, more capable of resolving common needs and more central to how customers managed their accounts.
| SIGNAL | RESULT | WHEN | WHAT IT SHOWED |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mobile usage redesign usability | 8 out of 10 | May 2019 | Customers could interpret their mobile usage state and identify when action was required. |
| Digital bill usability | 4.6 out of 5 | September 2019 | The redesigned summary improved orientation and comprehension in a high-volume support journey. |
| Self-serve payment rate | 99% | March 2021 | Digital had become the primary payment channel, with Care and Retail representing 1% of payment volume. |
| Rogers billing CSAT | 42.9% | March 2021 | The Digital View and Pay Bill experience exceeded its 38.4% target after recovering from an earlier low. |
| Fido billing CSAT | 45.8% | March 2021 | Both brands exceeded their targets during the same reporting period. |
| Payment-related calls | 23% lower YoY | Q3 2021 | Rogers reported fewer payment-related calls while automated notifications and auto-pay adoption expanded. |
The work also supported an internal business case estimating $20 to $30 million in annual cost avoidance through reduced billing and account-related care contacts. The projection established the scale of the opportunity and gave leadership a commercial frame for continued investment in the self-serve portfolio.
What I Left Behind
The lasting result was a stronger design organization with clearer ownership and a more disciplined way of working. Senior designers could lead streams with real autonomy. Intermediate designers had coaching, review and research support around their decisions. Product teams had a defined route for intake and prioritization. Research had a credible upstream role in shaping the problem space.
The portfolio also had a shared experience frame. Journey mapping helped teams understand how independently managed touchpoints contributed to one customer relationship. Regular reviews and common evidence gave the design team a practical way to maintain that coherence through organizational change.
For me, this body of work defines UX management as the design of conditions around the work: the team structure, evidence, priorities, decision rights and cross-functional relationships that allow good product decisions to compound over time.
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 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.