Building a career pipeline for music creatives
The Sarz Academy (TSA) is a creative education platform for people looking to break into the music industry. It’s not just a course library. It’s built around a full loop: learn a skill, prove you understand it, connect with mentors and find real opportunities.
Previously, it existed as an offline programme, hosting students in a physical location for a set period to teach them. That history is part of why digitising it mattered: there was already a real curriculum and a real alumni base.
The platform operates as a multi-sided ecosystem serving four distinct user types: students, mentors, instructors and admins. I designed the product end to end, from initial concept to execution.
Finish the course, then now what?
Most online learning platforms solve one piece of the puzzle. Coursera-style platforms teach. LinkedIn-style platforms network. Job boards list jobs. Almost none of them connect the three.
A student can finish a course on most platforms and still be stuck asking the same questions: Now what? Who do I learn from next? How do I turn this into a job? TSA needed to answer that.
Stakeholders also highlighted that manually managing offline mentorship bookings, disconnected job listings and unverified student project reviews created operational bottlenecks.
Structure before screens
I didn’t start by designing screens. I started by defining the architecture underneath them.
The core structure I landed on was Track — Course — Module — Lesson — Assessment. A Course is a single learning experience. A Track is a curated pathway made up of multiple Courses in a fixed order.
Once that hierarchy existed, I worked portal by portal (Student, then Mentor, then Instructor, then Admin), checking each new decision against the others so a change on the student side didn’t quietly break the mentor or admin experience.
01 — Sequential locking, not open access
Students move through a Track in a fixed order. They can’t jump to Module 2 until Module 1 is complete, and they can’t move to the next Course in a Track until the preceding one is done.
The UI highlights this constraint with explicit lock icons on inaccessible content, turning the learning track from an open playlist into a strict, verifiable progression.
02 — Two-tier assessment model
Each module ends in a short, self-paced quiz with instant grading and a minimum pass mark. Each course, by contrast, ends in an in-depth project reviewed by an instructor.
To manage user expectations during slower reviews, the system sends progress updates through in-app notifications and email alerts the moment a decision is finalised.
03 — Alumni access is earned, not given
The Alumni section, which features the alumni community, industry job boards, bootcamps and the mentorship hub, isn’t open to every enrolled student. It unlocks only after a student successfully completes at least one full track.
This gate ensures the alumni space is made up only of people who have demonstrated competence.
04 — Legacy students shouldn’t have to re-earn their place
During stakeholder conversations, I learned that TSA already had an alumni base from its offline programmes. This raised an important question: how could these alumni access the new platform and its alumni section without repeating a learning journey they had already completed in person?
To address this, I designed a direct alumni invite flow in the admin portal, allowing admins to send eligible alumni an invitation to join the platform with alumni access already enabled.
05 — Decoupling courses from tracks for scalability
I designed a system where each course exists as a reusable block within the admin portal. Courses are created and managed independently in the Courses section. When creating a new learning track, admins simply select and map existing courses into the track rather than building them inline from scratch.
This approach was designed with scalability in mind. As the catalogue grows, the same course can be reused across multiple tracks without redundant data entry or duplication, keeping the content structure clean and manageable as the platform expands.
What came out of it
The hardest part wasn’t any individual screen; it was making sure a decision in one portal didn’t quietly contradict a rule in another. I learned that designing a multi-sided platform is less about how each screen looks and more about whether the rules connecting them actually hold.
TSA is still in development and hasn’t launched yet, so I don’t have adoption or engagement numbers to point to. What the work did establish was the core experience across the platform for four user types, creating a foundation for the product to scale.
