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Case Study

Musica.com.pt — Product & Growth

Founder — Ongoing since March 2025 — Viseu, Portugal

Musica.com.pt project banner

📣 The Idea

Portugal has world-class music, festivals and artists — but no modern, opinionated digital destination dedicated to covering them with the same depth and craft that international outlets bring to their scenes. Musica.com.pt was born to fill that gap: a product built from the ground up with a journalist's voice, a designer's eye, and a product manager's obsession with growth and data.

From day one the challenge was doing it with zero team, zero budget, and a deadline of one year to build both audience and authority.

🎯 Objective

  • Build and launch a credible, design-led music journalism platform from scratch.
  • Achieve sustainable organic traffic through technical SEO, editorial strategy and content architecture.
  • Establish musica.com.pt as the primary reference for Portuguese-language music journalism.
  • Define a monetisation roadmap: display, affiliate, events partnerships and branded content.
  • Demonstrate that a one-person product team can ship and scale a media product to meaningful scale.

🏆 Results

55k+Monthly unique visitors
600k+Monthly page views
#1Portuguese music journalism reference
<1yrTime from zero to market leader

🥋 My Role

Everything. As sole founder, I wear every hat: product owner, designer, developer, editor-in-chief, SEO strategist, photographer, and brand director. This project is the purest expression of the multi-disciplinary approach I bring to every engagement — and proof that product thinking, when applied holistically, compounds fast.

Day-to-day this means: setting the editorial roadmap, commissioning and editing content, building and iterating the platform, running SEO experiments, managing social channels, negotiating partnerships with labels and festivals, and reading the data to decide what gets prioritised next.

📑 How It Was Built

The site was designed with SEO and performance as core constraints from day one — not retrofitted later. Information architecture was defined to capture long-tail search intent across artists, festivals, genres and dates. Every content type (review, interview, festival guide, news) has a distinct template optimised for both UX and search.

The design system was built in PenPot and translated directly to custom HTML/CSS/PHP — no off-the-shelf theme. Typography, colour, whitespace and hierarchy are tuned for reading experience at editorial depth: long-form articles, rich media embeds, and artist profiles sit alongside short-form news in a layout that scales gracefully from mobile to desktop.

Growth experiments have covered: structured data markup, internal linking architecture, image optimisation pipelines, AMP, social graph metadata, newsletter capture, and editorial partnerships with record labels and festival press offices.

🧠 What This Demonstrates

This project is deliberately different from the Kindred case studies in this portfolio. Those show what I can do inside a large, well-resourced organisation. Musica.com.pt shows what I do with autonomy, no budget, and full ownership — and how quickly product instincts translate into real-world outcomes when friction is removed.

The skills at work here — content strategy, technical SEO, design systems, growth experimentation, monetisation thinking, stakeholder management (with labels, artists, festivals) — map directly onto what product leaders need from a Lead Designer who can think beyond the screen.

🔧 Tools & Stack

Figma / PenPot  ·  Adobe Creative Suite  ·  VSCode  ·  HTML / CSS / JavaScript / PHP  ·  Google Search Console  ·  Google Analytics  ·  Ahrefs  ·  Screaming Frog  ·  Miro  ·  Git / Bitbucket

Thank you for reading! ❤️

CMS & Back-End Tools Consolidation

Due to the sensitive nature of certain information, some details or screenshots might be restricted or blurred, considering ongoing developments and confidentiality constraints.

Description

Project Winston was initiated to unify diverse in-house CMS and tools into a robust role-based CMS, tailored to cater to varied markets, languages, and currencies.

This involved comprehensive research into the 32Red ecosystem, organising many interviews and meetings with teams, stakeholders and seasoned (as well as new) users of the existing sytems. Insights gathered from these interactions laid the foundation for the creation of initial mockups, prototypes, and the visual identity defining Winston's appearance and user experience.

The project's impact extended beyond backstage operations to significantly enhance front-end user experiences.

Notably, with infrastructure and database restructuring, Winston delivered remarkable performance improvements, with page load times and overall performance seeing substantial increases upwards of 30-40%.

Objective: Consolidate In-House Tools into a Unified Role-Based CMS Solution (Project Winston)

  • Integration of Various In-House Tools: Unified disparate in-house CMS and tools into a cohesive role-based CMS platform, ensuring seamless integration and functionality across different markets, languages, and currencies.
  • Enhancement of Content Management Capabilities:
    • Streamlined management of games and their categorization.
    • Efficient handling of diverse content, including content pages and promotional inserts/overlays.
    • Implementation of a robust system for managing promotions and creating promotional journeys/funnels.
    • Simplified generation of landing pages to support marketing efforts.
  • Optimization of User Experience:
    • Implementation of user-friendly dashboards for enhanced usability.
    • Improved image handling through uploads and dynamic image creation features.
  • Research and Stakeholder Engagement:
    • Conducted comprehensive research on the 32Red ecosystem to inform the development of Winston.
    • Held multiple interviews and meetings with stakeholders and colleagues/operators for insights into their daily tool usage, informing the project's direction.
  • Prototype Development and Visual Design:
    • Generated initial mockups and prototypes based on research findings.
    • Defined the visual language for Winston, ensuring a consistent and appealing user interface.
  • Infrastructure Enhancement and Performance Boost:
    • Collaborated on IT infrastructure and database restructuring for optimal performance.
    • Achieved significant performance improvements, with backend personnel and front-end users experiencing page load and performance increases exceeding 30-40%.


Native iOS Casino App

Certain details and/or screenshots might not be available, or might appear with certain parts erased or blurred. This is still an ongoing project and might reveal sensitive information about the business or its processes that unfortunately can't be shared in public or through non-official channels.

Targetting the UK market, the challenge on this project was moving from a wrapper/embedded Casino app experience to a native Casino App.

My team was responsible to deliver this project very quickly, from competitor research to several meetings with internal stakeholders, brand and development teams and external/3rd party intervenients for a few of the different processes, to the final mockups and deliverables.

The app is currently on its final stages of development and will be submitted to the app store pretty soon!

Discovering & Engaging

Creating opportunities and product real-estate to support the brand ambassador Leigh Francis and "Keith Lemon", and the ongoing UK wide TV campaigns. The aim was to increase the brand ambassador visibility on the website experience, landing pages, marketing comms and others.

From header banners, to larger more interactive areas, landing pages, to promotional content and pages, to a mini casino game (called Keith's Lucky Lemons), to safer gambling messaging, we've made sure "Keith" was all over the place.

Peeeedro - Clara

Content Personalization

Every season, and every other special occasion, we surprise our users with many different "on-site activites", little things that make the product experience feel special and differentiated from the competition.

From mini treasure hunts, to on-site animated christmas market promotions and mini-games/events, Football World Cup or Olympic games hubs, Valentine's day or Halloween themed, we always have 3 or 4 little surprises to make the website celebrate with the user those special passing moments and seasons.

It's also times like these where we allow ourselves to experiment a little further with new technologies (looking at AR/VR). You can see below our latest experiment, parallax animations and object movement controlled by the mobile phone aceleromenter/gyroscope which then resulted in a very fancy Halloween themed on-site wide banner.

Donations Platform with QR Integration

This product is a donations platform to support local institutions and charitable projects.

Made both for institutions and donors, the user can quickly register as a verified institution, create a profile page with images, and generate a QR code to use throughout his activities and marketing materials, to request donations. As a donor, the user can quickly register (or stay anonymous), scan a QR code, and be easily sent to a payments platform where he can donate any amount.

This product was conceived in a 48 Hours Hackathon organized in Gibraltar by the local Girls in Tech community and by the Gibraltar Developers (GibDevs) community, and won the award for the most innovative product.

Gamification

Certain details and/or screenshots might not be available, or might appear with certain parts erased or blurred. This is still an ongoing project and might reveal sensitive information about the business or its processes that unfortunately can't be shared in public or through non-official channels.

Several studies were produced on how to introduce gamification elements to the Casino products to increase retention and engagement, as well as a new innovative Casino product, 100% Social and Gamified.

Heavily based on Abraham Maslow "Hierarchy of Needs" and Nyr Eyal's "Hook", we've studied different concepts and through missions and progression systems, created a system that rewards players for engaging with the product and allows him to progress where he can unlock more activities and bigger rewards.

From our researches, not only we created a more ethical and sustainable gambling environment for the player, but we've also seen a change in the players behaviour - casino players aren't really social, but we gave them something to brag about.

Peeeedro - Fuga

User Onboarding Improvements

Certain details and/or screenshots might not be available, or might appear with certain parts erased or blurred. This is still an ongoing project and might reveal sensitive information about the business or its processes that unfortunately can't be shared in public or through non-official channels.

The UK Casino market is heavily regulated and every year there's changes that require teams to adapt quickly and changes to be done even faster.

This project aimed to increase acquisition values across all markets/devices, as well as improving the user experience and informing the player sooner rather than later of all the changes imposed by the law and what do they mean to them in a clear and concise way.

Adding to a normal registration process, law requires any casino to do a few player verifications - from personal/ID checks, to source of funds, and a few others, so all of these need to be factored in the Casino ecosystem, as well as regular checks to ensure all the information sent by the user is up to date.

Design Systems

It's very important for a business to keep its product visual language to a minimum and unified under core concepts, to be served as a "single source of truth" for business partners and 3rd parties, or for new team members to get acquainted with our day to day "language".

Following Atomic Design principles, we've split our elements into their simplest atoms, and from there we've built them up until we've had our final templates and everything needed in our "visual language", to work across many devices, screens and operating systems.

Teetimes - Portugal #1 Golf Agency

Teetimes.pt had their main product spread across 3 different non-responsive websites, with 3 different brands, and the challenge was to unify all different products into 1 powerful website that allows Golf Players to book their perfect holidays - from tee times, to hotel bookings, to airport transfers, to golf clubs, everything is covered.

The new website (multi language, multi currency) ended up in a very comprehensive solution that worked across all devices, and where the user could immediately see in real time any tee times in Portugal or Spain, and immediately book it and anything to go with it, or manage everything through their user area.

In the end, this website quickly replaced the previous ones with a resounding success and bringing the business to new heights.

Rotolight Magic Eye

Now discontinued, Rotolight Magic Eye was the app done to control the Rotolight Anova Professional LED Flood Light.

The Rotolight Anova was the world first professional light fully controled via WiFi, and the Magic Eye was the brain behind the whole operation - you could control up to 128 lights, create different scenes, store them, reload them and sequence them in whatever way you'd prefer.

One of its innovative features was being able to replicate in real-time the lighting conditions through the iPhone camera - let's say, if you were in Bahamas shooting whatever Pirates, you could quickly read the light conditions around you, then send that information to the light on-set in England, and it would immediately replicate the exterior.

Both light and app won many industry awards in worldwide shows (CINEC, NAB, CINEGEAR, IBC,... ) and through many photography and videography associations and societies events.

Rotolight

Rotolight was a very recent company when I joined as Lead/Senior Designer and shortly after they moved to Pinewood Studios.

From being responsible of all online and offline graphics (prints, ads, magazines, flyers, brand materials, marketing materials, outdoors, ...), also had the website and any supporting app/site experience under my umbrella.

As a very young and innovative company at the time, we were embracing all the latest tech and innovations to create a strong website and presence, as well as bring it into every new product, making it a very fast paced, passionate and challenging environment to work on. It was also very inspiring, and gave me the opportunity to have a peek at some of Hollywood's recent movies being recorded, as well as being side by side and talk with some movie stars.

Appleworld Distribution

Appleworld Distribution was the parent/umbrella company that held Rotolight and a few others: Planet Audio Systems, Planet Video Systems and Mac Universe.

As a distributor and mainly focusing on the B2B market, it was a very interesting opportunity to work with a few different brands whenever they introduced their products in the UK, as it would give us the opportunity to work with teams from other companies in beset tailoring a product to be tailored for the UK market.

From creating custom mini-websites for product releases and events, and mantaining the website and all offline and online graphics, literature and marketing materials to the front user facing Planet Audio, Planet Video and Mac Universe, which were fully fledged online shops targetting the Pro-Audio, Pro-Video and Mac audiences.

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Mandelbrot Zoo

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AIDS Campaign & Poster Collection

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Zare

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