Letras Academy

Context

Letras Academy grew out of a piece of feedback we kept hearing: lots of people said they’d learned English by reading and translating song lyrics on Letras. The company decided to take that seriously and turn it into its own product, teaching languages through lyrics. The project started in 2020 and launched in 2021, right in the middle of the forced shift to remote work during the pandemic.

Challenge

Before designing a single screen, an intense discovery: conversations with language teachers, benchmarking, market-share research, and a lot of user research. It surfaced three very different pains that wouldn’t fit into a single solution.

1. A young audience wanting to learn a language through music. A large mass, but with little willingness to spend and driven by entertainment (English to travel, to understand films and series), not the classic “English for work” pains.
2. Most weren’t willing to pay, or to pay much. A small slice was, but demanded depth and human contact.
3. Private teachers struggling to find students, stay organized, and get paid.

The design question was how to serve three needs this different inside a single product, without bloating it or losing focus.

Process & decisions

Cover every need to earn volume. Since the general audience would only pay a little, the business depended on volume of subscribers, and volume would only come from meeting every kind of need. So the subscription got two levels instead of betting on one: quick 15-minute lessons anchored to a specific song (tied to the user’s taste, great for learning while having fun) and full courses with a beginner-to-advanced track that use music but focus on learning, not taste. They weren’t redundant: each level covered a need that, on its own, wouldn’t sustain the volume.

Free content that pulls toward paid, without being a separate product. Rather than investing in a parallel free product, the free tier leaned on what Letras already had (the translation, the product’s core) plus pointed pieces that made more sense pointing to the courses than standing alone. That way the free tier warmed up leads without competing with the subscription.

A marketplace outside the subscription, taking a cut of each transaction. A private teacher’s value is of a different order. Folding it into the subscription would demand a very high price that wouldn’t work for the mass; and the people willing to pay for depth saw the value in each teacher’s own time. We kept the marketplace separate and took a percentage of each transaction. We also decided not to price the teacher’s hour: fixing a rate would be unfair and would disengage exactly the people we wanted to attract. The marketplace then targeted all three teacher pains at once: acquisition, scheduling, and payment.

How I led it

First and foremost, this was a leadership project. As Design Manager, I directed a team of five designers through discovery, ideation, iterations, and a complex release, all under the strain of adapting to remote work. I set up the rituals that were missing to make it work at a distance: team syncs, 1:1s, and development conversations. But I made a point of not stepping away from the craft. I kept at least 40% of my week for execution, always paired with a designer. Working alongside them was how I trained and amplified each one without ever losing the thread of the real work.

Outcome

Over time, we realized it made more sense to simplify the offering. Instead of a standalone subscription, the Academy content was unified into the single Letras subscription, in one plan. More than any launch number, what this project left me was the process: a discovery that mapped very different needs, product and business-model decisions built on top of them, and the experience of leading a whole team through all of it remotely, in the middle of the pandemic. It’s the project that shaped me most as a design lead.