INDUSTRY:
TELECOM
COMPANY:
TIM Brasil
ROLE:
Product Design Manager
YEAR:
2021–2026
Team Building
highlights.
context.
Until 2020, design didn't exist at TIM as a role. It wasn't in the company's job architecture: no title, no career level and no budget line for user research. Interfaces were delivered by consultancies and digital agencies, and the designers working on TIM's products were hired by those partners.
There was one designer inside the company, the person who hired me and then became my manager. I joined in 2020 as the second.
A single screen took at least a month to ship, and design knowledge left the company with every contract that ended.
The business context was clear: TIM wanted to speed up its digital channels, but the outsourced model couldn't provide speed or quality.
In 2022, as Product Design Manager, my job was to build that department: hire the people, define how it would work and make design a role inside the company.
Four years later, the department had eight people, design had a seat in company-wide strategic forums and only one person had left voluntarily. This is what happened: three decisions and what each of them cost.
process & decisions.
Hiring for seniority, and living with the cost
As hiring manager for the new department, I set the team strategy and tied it to my leadership: 9 senior UX designers instead of a mixed pyramid with mid-level and junior profiles. I ran the whole process end to end, interviewing, selecting and closing every hire.
Why: the company needed to show results fast. A senior team was the only way to get speed without giving up quality, since there was no internal design leadership available to train junior designers while delivering.
The cost: a smaller and more expensive team. The bet was that organization and delivery speed would make up for it. Hiring also took 3 months longer than expected: the UX market was overheated, and two designers left in their first week after being approved elsewhere. All 9 positions were filled in 5 months.
The open problem: nine people at the same level means very little room to promote, and that remained a challenge. Instead of promising titles, I built an individual career plan with each designer, mapping growth expectations against the openings the company could realistically offer, and used scope as currency: more autonomy, more exposure and ownership of strategic projects. That also gave me clear criteria to evaluate them.
Would I do it again: yes. I kept this model through 2026.
Embedded designers, and the visibility problem it created
Designers worked in cross-functional squads from the beginning. Building and rolling out the Design System was a parallel challenge, so a purely centralized team would have been too slow to keep up.
But the embedded model had a known risk: it looked a lot like the outsourced model TIM already had, with designers working inside isolated projects, accountable only to their PM and disconnected from each other.
What went wrong first: there was no single board. Each designer followed only their squad's board and presented work in Figma. Visibility was poor and always late. I couldn't build a strategic view of what the area was delivering, and I had nothing to bring into executive and tactical forums, which is exactly what a new department needs to survive its first year.
What I changed:
A single delivery board holding everyone's tasks, linked back to each squad's board
An executive presentation template, so designers documented their work as short cases instead of walking stakeholders through Figma files
Rituals to keep the team connected: dailies, weeklies, design critiques, monthly 1:1s and a bi-weekly executive review with our director
Taking two people off feature delivery
When the new app shipped, demand for designers on that project dropped. At the same time, e-commerce was internalized, which increased the need for a properly structured Design System pipeline.
I moved two people into a Design Ops unit dedicated to the multiplatform Design System, its documentation and governance.
In a team of 9, taking two people off feature delivery needs an argument. The return was speed: projects built on the Design System (app and e-commerce) shipped faster than those that weren't.
results.
Team
From 1 designer to a department of 8: 3 senior specialists and 5 specialists, including a dedicated Design Ops unit
All 9 senior roles filled in 5 months
3 promotions: two designers Specialist to Senior Specialist, and one from Senior Consultant to Specialist
Stable since 2023: one voluntary exit in three years
5 salary increases granted within the team
Internal climate survey: team score consistently above 90%, around 6 points above the company average
Design as a function
Design became a recognized role inside TIM's job architecture. It didn't exist before.
Usability testing and research entered the delivery flow. There had been no testing at TIM before the department, and no budget line for it.
Designers moved upstream: from receiving briefs to helping frame problems and shape strategy at the start of projects
At manager level, design gained a seat in directorate and company-wide strategic forums for the first time
Operation
Design System reduced development time for new screens by 30%
Design definitions ready before development sprints, through a dual-track model (product design + Design Ops)
Business
E-commerce internalized in December 2024: my team built the journey with the Sales directorate, replacing 3 outsourced contracts, with +3% sales growth and cost reduction.
Sales over WhatsApp was brought in-house at the same time. It had been running through partners on unofficial profiles, without measurement. The redesigned flow made it official, designed and measurable for the first time.
