Scaling Ecosystems @ AT&T
When you scale a platform serving tens of millions of users, missing identity infrastructure creates massive drop-offs. Here is how we redesigned the bill-splitting ecosystem for AT&T to turn hidden users into empowered brand advocates.
The Challenge: Where Multi-Line Accounts Leak Revenue
Multi-line wireless accounts carry a hidden structural flaw. Sixty percent of wireless customers exist as unknown occupants on someone else's account, meaning they have no direct digital identity and zero platform autonomy.
When financial friction hits, thirty-four percent of those customers port out simply because managing payments with the primary account owner is too frustrating. Families and roommates were forced to rely on fragmented workarounds like Venmo and PayPal just to handle monthly wireless bills.
The Approach: Solving Identity First
You cannot share a bill if you do not know who you are sharing it with. Before designing a single payment screen, we had to solve user identity.
We introduced a clear role-based ecosystem that brought transparency and control to every single line:
Account Owner: Retains full financial control, splits bills by line or percentage, and manages overall permissions.
Manager: Acts as a trusted delegate to view billing details and assist with household management without cancellation rights.
Member: Gains their own AT&T digital identity, allowing them to pay their exact portion, manage their own line, and upgrade independently.
Pro Tips: Lessons in Enterprise Leadership
Identity is infrastructure: Solving user profiles initially felt like scope creep to some stakeholders, but it was the foundational pillar that made split payments mathematically and legally possible.
Financial friction is an emotional problem: The blocker was never about calculating the math. It was about trust, social awkwardness, and the anxiety of what happens if someone misses a payment. Design had to address those trust dynamics explicitly before any interface could feel safe to use.
Competitive analysis is about finding the gap: We studied platforms like Venmo, Chase, Uber, and Amazon. None of them provided a turnkey template for a complex telecom account. Our differentiation came from combining the best user interface patterns while solving for the unique trust dynamics of a shared household.
The Business Impact
By replacing manual workarounds with a native split-pay experience, we achieved strong results across the board:
Fifty-seven percent of surveyed wireless customers expressed immediate interest in a native split bill tool.
Thirty-five percent increase in engagement across native applications serving over fifty million users.
Twenty-eight percent reduction in support tickets related to billing and payment flows.
Whether you are scaling an enterprise product ecosystem or looking for a lead product designer who can align stakeholders and untangle complex service flows, let us talk about what we can build together.