Context
Zain wanted to launch a digital-first mobile operator in Iraq — a startup inside an established telecom. The brief: build an MVNO that competes on experience, not price, in a market where network quality and customer expectations were both quite unpredictable. We got 6 months to do all that.
Approach
I treated this like a startup that happens to sell mobile service, not a traditional telco. This proved effective, if somewhat controversial. I mostly skipped the usual telco vendor stack — used Matrixx for charging / BSS, as it's a nice midpoint of telco integration and software. For everything else (mediation - a fancy name to convert fall records to other records - reporting, data warehouse, etc.), used open-source and in-house built software.
Started with a system integrator that was signed right before I joined and a tiny consulting team. Quickly recriuited key peole (product, tech operations. telco ops) and made the integrator reorganise the team we got (An architect, a project manager, a program manager and a SCRUM master was a bit too much overhead for 5 developers).
Ended up with a A 15-person team with blended roles and - after launch - a new development partner.
What made a difference
Thinking things through from first principles: what the telecom world calls 'mediation' (and has multimillion-dollar systems for) is just converting a textfile to another format. The second version is much less fancy-sounding, but costs a fraction. Building gradually instead of the usual (for the industry) big build up front way. Not spending on fixing problems that we may one day have. Resisting complexity: microservices and complex data management tools have their place. It's not at a company that's just getting started.
Result
We got 100,000 customers in the first year and they liked us a lot; NPS was above 50. We had a platform that cost roughly half of regional competitors. The company had 4x the regional ARPU by targeting young, digital-native customers with value-added services (tickets, gaming vouchers) instead of competing only on price.