Sixteen people sat on T-Mobile's senior leadership team. Each one had a near-full-time social publicist — a team of eight of us running their platforms, their thought leadership, their trade coverage. Inside a 60,000-person company, that kind of visibility turned them into mini celebrities.
Which created a problem nobody owned. Every VP, EVP, and director below them wanted to announce things too — a launch, a promotion, a milestone — and had nowhere to go. My manager, my skip-level, and the SLT member above them were fielding the same three questions multiple times a day: What do I post? How do I say it? Am I even allowed?
Nobody asked me to fix it. I had a few open hours and a creative itch, so I pulled back to 30,000 feet and asked a smaller question: what could two people build that would serve three hundred?
The answer, across 2023 and into 2024, was a whiteboard, a spreadsheet, some Red Bulls, and three months of nights and lunch breaks. No budget, no headcount, no mandate — just concepting, mockups, and a handful of guinea pigs willing to test it on their own accounts.
What we shipped: an onboarding kit with a handwritten note from our CCO, swag, a desk trinket, and a plain-language list of do's and don'ts. A dedicated Slack and Teams line straight to us. A "what's next for me" roadmap that met people wherever they already were — dormant, occasional, or all-in. Custom 1:1 consultations. A how-to video library. It wasn't automation. It was people helping people, at scale.
The moment it became real was the T-Studios pitch. Walking into an internal creative team — proud, territorial, and under no obligation to say yes to someone they don't report to — and asking them to build alongside us. We sold them. I left that room a different person, because the thing stopped being a deck and became a program with production behind it.
Fifteen to twenty leaders signed on the first month. A hundred by the second. Three hundred by week ten, where it settled — with triple-digit weekly active users in the channel, and a SharePoint hub that became the front door for anyone in the building who wanted a voice.