Spotlight Magazine
A POC international magazine focused on creating a 'spotlight' on Black professionals, given the lack of representation across various industries. This magazine aspires to become a platform of inspiration for younger Black creatives so that they can explore different career paths and reach for limitless goals. We intended for this to be an official project that we launched to the market however, due to private circumstances that occured at the time, we were unable to carry on with the launch of the product.
As Co-Founder and Product Owner, I handled the business-related aspects of this project, including developing roadmaps, the go-to-market strategy, business and product requirements, and managing the marketing and launch of the product whilst my partner managed the design and development of the website.
At first, we researched to find what other projects had done in this space. We found some really interesting and useful existing projects, such as:
1. https://blackswho.design/
2. https://afrotech.com/
At the time, we could not find many, if any, examples of existing projects creating a platform for Black professionals across various industries and share their words of wisdom to the upcoming generations.
Initially, we carried out some user-research interviews with students and young professionals using our social network. We identified different areas and topics that they had interest in and created a prioritisation list from that. When defining the questions, we used these topics as a guidance point and iterated over and over again to find a healthy balance of questions that gave us a sense of the interviewee's personality whilst empowering them to share personal advice to our readers.
Working in Tech ourselves, with friends and acquantances across different industries such as fashion, investment banking, etc we used our network to find both individuals we had worked with and had recommended to us. We spoke with them to find out more and to see if they had interest in participating in our magazine.
Below are some of the mockups created for both the desktop and mobile platform
P.S: Some of the images of the individuals below are placeholders - not all of them are images of them!
As mentioned at the beginning of this case study, unfortunately do to personal events we could not carry out our go-to-market strategy. Our interviews were collated and the product was ready to be shipped but the circumstances didn't allow it. I loved working on this project and wish I could have shared the wonderful and amazing content that we had gathered but I'm excited to take my learnings and create more impact for my POC community in the future!