T-Mobile for Business has a new leader shaping how it builds solutions and works with partners. Michael Labunski has stepped into the role of SVP, business product & marketing, succeeding Mo Katibeh as of October 2026.

Labunski’s path to the position includes more than two decades of experience across telecom, cloud, and channel leadership. He spent more than 14 years at AT&T spanning sales, field marketing, distribution strategy, and chief-of-staff roles, followed by stints as head of go-to-market strategy for channels and alliances at Amazon Web Services, chief data officer and VP of strategic programs at RingCentral, and managing director for the Americas at Broadcom Software.

He joined T-Mobile in September 2024 as VP of business product marketing & strategy before being elevated to his current role. We sat down with Labunski to get his take on the new role, where T-Mobile's partner strategy is headed, and who's driving it.

Channel Partners: What does this new role mean for how you'll work with partners?

Labunski: My job is to make sure T-Mobile for Business has the right solutions to meet what our business customers need, and that those customers know about them. Partners are a huge, essential part of how that happens, so I see my role as helping them win. On their terms.

Channel Partners: Where is T-Mobile headed with its partner strategy?

Labunski: We want to be a supplier that more partners, of every type, want to work with. That means evolving how we think about partners. Programs alone aren't the answer. We believe that partners need us to be easier to work with and to show up earlier in the customer conversation. We're focused on three things. We're simplifying how partners engage with us, so they spend more time with customers and less time navigating T-Mobile. We're building around the customer's problem, with partners, instead of handing them a product to sell. We're also bringing connectivity into the conversation at the start. As AI moves into sites, fleets, and distributed workforces, the network determines whether a solution works where the business actually runs. Too often, that gets decided last. We want partners to lead with it.

Michael Labunski

Channel Partners: Who is leading this shift day-to-day?

Labunski: Chris Jones (VP of ecosystems and partner alliances) is the person to talk to. The shift in how we think about partners is exactly what he's focused on. T-Mobile now has an executive dedicated to the full partner ecosystem. One who has spent nearly his entire career building partner value. Not a novice to the channel—a tried-and-true veteran. We asked Chris to lead the strategy, and my team's job is to support and enable him. For partners, that means one accountable leader and a clearer way to engage with us.

What’s Ahead for T-Mobile in 2027?

T-Mobile's channel strategy faces a pivotal test: translating Labunski's vision of simplicity, customer-first solution design, and connectivity-led selling into measurable wins for partners on the ground. The opportunity is significant. As AI adoption accelerates across distributed workforces, fleets, and multi-site operations, network reliability becomes a decision point partners can own early rather than an afterthought, giving T-Mobile a differentiated story to tell against rivals still selling connectivity as a commodity. But the challenges are real too: shifting partner perception after years of program-centric engagement takes time, and execution now rests heavily on the newly accountable partnership between Labunski's product and marketing organization and Jones's ecosystem leadership.

Whether T-Mobile can deliver on "easier to work with" at scale, while keeping partners central to the customer conversation rather than downstream of it, will determine if 2027 marks a genuine turning point for the carrier in the channel.