“Don’t glue the Legos together.”
We’ve just passed our year mark at In Tandem, which is a moment of immense celebration and pride at all our team has accomplished. Along that journey, the phrase “don’t glue the Legos together” has been embedded as a mantra to keep our team agile as we adapt in alignment to what others draw out of us.
One year ago, In Tandem was little more than a few questions:
How can we make partnerships between youth and organizations safe, easy, and effective? And how can we create experiences that feel meaningful for both groups—sparking authentic moments of collaboration that don’t just impact the room, but ripple far beyond it?
While we continue to refine our path in answering these questions, we’ve learned so much that we're continually building on. Just as important as innovating forward is knowing when to step back and evaluate.
This is the story of how we moved from scrappy to scalable by designing with humility, working with agility, and listening with empathy across a marketplace that deserves two spotlights.
Our Scrappy Start: Building While Delivering
When we first opened applications for our Youth Voice Fellowship cohort, we didn’t have the basic structures that we now thrive on.
We were still developing our core infrastructure while onboarding our very first youth cohort of 180 youth. That meant, in typical startup fashion, building the plane as we flew it. Streamlining internal systems one day and leading youth orientation the next. It meant creating templates, trainings, and tools at the same time they were being used, and rapidly adjusting when a portion didn’t resonate.
We were thankful that youth showed up eager, thoughtful, and ready to collaborate—even without the polish of a well-known name behind us.
We had to balance speed and service with listening and adjusting. That meant staying responsive to the real-time needs of both youth and organizational partners and embracing moments that required pausing, reworking, or letting go of something we had just built.
A clear example was our cohort structure. We originally designed for a pod-like structure where youth partners could convene in small, diverse groups led by peer mentors (older youth partners). We originally thought this structure would lead to closer bonds with youth and a sense of organization while providing leadership opportunities but the opposite happened.
Youth Partners struggled to create bonds, and peer mentors felt constantly discouraged by their lack of engagement, so we pivoted to full cohort engagement and created more public opportunities to build community. We also started leaning into the groups naturally formed by youth partners working on shared projects with organizations, rather than randomizing their social groups. This gave them a stronger foundation to build relationships—rooted in experiences and shared insight. If we hadn’t been listening and willing to let go, we would’ve stuck to broken systems.
Looking back:
This phase tested our instincts. It surfaced blind spots we didn’t know we had. But most importantly, it reminded us to stay open—to be humble enough to revise, even when we thought we had it right the first time.
Designing for Two Audiences at Once
One of the core tensions we continue to navigate is designing a program that works for both youth and organizational partners. We quickly realized that our instinctual leans, while well-intended, were veering us down paths that weren’t aligned. For example, we developed systems to capture the massive loads of data we were collecting—from sign-up numbers and incoming requests to feedback loops and design specifications.
We built tools like spec and capacity trackers, with space to hold insights from implementation and experiments, so we could identify trends across projects and better understand what to prioritize in service of both immediate delivery and long-term scale.
Through this process, it was incredibly helpful to have a clear method to test our hypotheses. Thoughts as simple as, “I fear youth don’t like submitting asynchronous video responses,” could be easily validated, or invalidated, through careful consideration of our data. We could look at sign-up rates, feedback from youth after participating, and directly ask about their experiences with these foundations in mind.
In the case of asynchronous videos, it turned out our own anxieties about filming responses were clouding our assumptions. Youth found them to be simple, fulfilling ways to share their voice—while factors like how much time they had to respond turned out to be far more important to their satisfaction.
Having this kind of access, and the humility to use it, allowed us to adjust our perspective quickly and saved us the heartache of a misaligned pivot. Even better, was the creation of a shared language which created a common foundation to base our conversations, and allowing us to uncover links that we might have glossed over otherwise.
It’s a fun challenge, calibrating learnings from the growth team’s retention and acquisition conversations, to the experiences of our youth partners in real time, and the realities of our infrastructure. We center our building on a foundation of trust and safety, but reaching that reality often looks different for each.
We understand that organizational partners need a streamlined way to engage youth, gather feedback, and translate it into product or program development.
Youth needed a space where their voices weren’t just heard, but spur tangible change—where participation felt meaningful, and where their time and lived experience were respected.
Each had valid needs. And we had an opportunity to put our codesign philosophy into practice with every emerging requirement.
What we learned: Building for two voices takes constant recalibration. But it’s possible—and powerful—if you’re willing to listen actively and act iteratively.
Building Something That Can Bend, Not Break
As we moved from pilot to scale, one thing became clear: building for growth couldn’t just mean doing more. It had to mean creating a structure that could stretch, flex, and still hold.
Internally, we clarified team roles and streamlined our infrastructure to keep up with shifting demand. Our systems were designed to support experimentation—small tests, fast feedback, and iterative change—without starting from scratch each time.
We approached that with intentionality:
- Leveraging systems that could adapt with market pulls
- Leaning on data to guide, not dictate
- Using authentic feedback to evolve our approach
I’ve shared examples highlighting the first two points, but the final point is strongly tied to our work of centering wellbeing—both for youth and for our team. That meant creating space to pause, adjust pacing, and acknowledge the human side of building something new.
There were many examples of this with youth, but one that stands out is from our early sessions—when we asked what would make this experience truly worthwhile for cohort members.
At the time, we assumed they may have joined for things like leadership experience, transcript boosters, or compensation. And while those were certainly part of it, something deeper came through: a desire to create real impact—and to feel it.
That motivation continues to shape our conversations with youth today. And as we head into the next fellowship year, we’re excited to make that impact even more tangible.
With all of this, I feel even more convicted that agility isn’t chaos—it’s discipline and shared alignment. It’s the wisdom to recognize when “good enough” truly is enough, and the restraint to avoid over-optimizing at the expense of impact. Agility for us means building a strong foundation that enables and embraces change.
Reflection: Scalability isn’t about locking things down—it’s about building something repeatable without losing integrity.
Final Thought: Let It Be Moveable
At In Tandem, we’ve learned that polish doesn’t equal readiness.
Sometimes, the perfect product or program can wait—while the real work happens in learning, adapting, and staying open. In a two-sided marketplace like ours, we've seen firsthand how assumptions can harden fast about what youth want, what organizations need, or what our infrastructure needs to function.
When that happens, innovation stalls.
That’s why we remind ourselves daily: don’t glue the Legos together.
Build with pieces that can shift, slide, and come apart as easily as they snap together. Because you’ll want to move them—whether that’s adjusting a fellowship format, reconfiguring an infrastructure, or responding to new insights from our incredible youth partners, as well as our organizational collaborators.
So, what could you build if you left space for it to evolve?
Sophie Leveille is the Chief Program Officer at In Tandem, a nonprofit that makes it easy and safe for organizations to engage with young people to improve the programs, products and services they experience.