For our 2022 Rising Stars, Fierce Wireless focused on the top U.S. operators. We’ve compiled a slate of impressive up-and-coming executives in the wireless industry from AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon and Dish. Interestingly, four of our Rising Stars this year started their careers through internal leadership development programs. We’re featuring the profiles of these executives, aged 35 or younger, this week, and we hope you enjoy reading them. These are all folks to keep an eye on as they make a mark in wireless.
T-Mobile is the U.S. carrier that has seen its business change the most during the last decade, and Linda Zhao has had a front row seat at the transformation.
Zhao came to T-Mobile in 2010 after a two-year stint as an investment banking analyst in the mergers and acquisitions group at Rothschild, a plum first job for an economics major from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. After two years in a Wall Street group that analyzed mergers on behalf of corporate clients, Zhao found herself at T-Mobile contemplating a merger from the inside, as her new employer agreed to become part of AT&T shortly after she started. As a new hire she wasn’t tasked with analyzing the $39 billion deal, but instead was assigned to look at a new concept in the wireless world: mobile data.
“The concept of data was foreign,” Zhao recalls. “We were assessing moving away from voice and text buckets into buckets that included data.” She remembers forecasting how much data customers would need based on the type of phone they had.
After three years in corporate strategy, Zhao was promoted to director, and in this role she focused on a number of strategic initiatives involving T-Mobile's digital products. One of her biggest projects was a new digital platform for the carrier's prepaid business, and this experience taught her how to manage a large scale program that involved many teams. She said she learned how to “evangelize a vision and then carve out a plan for achieving that vision.”
In 2017 Zhao was named senior director, product strategy, planning and operations, and the following year T-Mobile and Sprint announced plans to merge. She said this led to one of her most humbling career experiences. She was tasked with evaluating how the two companies’ product portfolios should come together, and how the teams should operate post-merger. The job was complex because T-Mobile and Sprint remained competitors, so Zhao did not have complete visibility into the Sprint product information but had to make recommendations nonetheless.
“I realized I didn’t really know what I was getting into, but I knew I had to get in there and figure it out,” she said.
Zhao’s success with that assignment led to an opportunity to return to the corporate strategy group, this time in a senior director role. She helped develop the original long-range business plan for T-Mobile’s fixed wireless access business, now one of the fastest-growing parts of the company.
In June 2021, Zhao was promoted to VP, leading 5G and emerging business strategy. She led strategy and assessment for the company's emerging businesses, including FWA and new 5G consumer products. Her team also spent time evaluating the fiber broadband opportunity.
A 2022 reorg moved her team into marketing, and Zhao's role expanded to include consumer product strategy. She's looking at how consumer connected devices are evolving and which product categories T-Mobile should prioritize. Zhao manages a group of 10, which she said is in the process of expanding to 20.
“There are an endless number of opportunities we can look at so I am constantly learning,” she said. “I love that I’m always doing something different. The most important thing for me is that it doesn’t feel like the same job, not just from a subject matter standpoint, but also I’m working with different people all the time.”
When she’s not working, Zhao is usually chasing her toddler or escaping with a book. Since mobile is such an integral part of daily life, she often finds herself thinking about 5G and how people will use the network in the future.
“I need to have a pulse on how wireless is changing,” she said. “I am always on some learning curve, and that is what keeps me at T-Mobile.”