Since launching, In Tandem has held over 100 conversations with companies and organizations designing products, programs, and policies that impact young people. These weren’t just casual chats. They were working sessions, sense-making deep dives, and early-stage collaborations that helped us better understand what makes designing with young people strategic, not just symbolic.
What’s clear: Leaders across sectors and industries are looking for more than input. They want sharper insight, better signals, and stronger alignment between what they build and who it’s for. We’re learning alongside them, and with every partner, we get clearer on what makes this work effective.
In this blog, we share some of those learnings.
And to those who’ve made time to explore this with us, thank you. Your curiosity, generosity, and willingness to rethink how decisions get made is what keeps this moving.
Listening isn’t just part of our process at In Tandem, it’s our core strength. These discovery conversations are more than a step in our journey; they’re the foundation of everything we do.
They’ve given us opportunities to understand the obstacles and aspirations of those looking to design with young people. This commitment to understanding allows us to remain adaptable, innovative, and impactful. Together with our partners, we’re shaping approaches where young people aren’t just included, they're instrumental in what gets built, tested, and reimagined.
This is just the beginning, and we’re excited to continue learning and collaborating with you!
Many teams understand the value of involving young people. But making that involvement meaningful, where youth perspectives truly shape what gets built, is another story. Across our work, these are five of the most common barriers we've heard and seen.
Engaging youth from diverse backgrounds isn’t always straightforward. Organizations often struggle to connect with underrepresented groups such as LGBTQ+ teens or youth in rural areas. These barriers can shrink who gets to be part of the process, leaving out perspectives that could surface blind spots or shift direction entirely.
Take this with you: If your feedback always comes from the same groups, it’s time to re-evaluate your sourcing strategy. Try mapping who isn’t in the room and adjusting your outreach, incentives, or formats to meet them where they are.
Financial limits and small teams often make it hard for organizations to prioritize time with young people. When capacity or budgets fall short for outreach, compensation, or facilitation, youth involvement can become rushed or surface-level. And when already stretched teams try to squeeze this work in, it rarely gets the depth, or follow-through, it deserves.
Take this with you: Build youth input into your core timeline, not just as a checkpoint, but as part of your design process. Start by asking: What decisions will this input actually shape and what do we need to do that well?
Coordinating schedules, managing consent processes, and navigating remote or hybrid settings can be complex and time-consuming. These logistical barriers often slow progress, making it challenging for organizations to maintain momentum and sustain youth participation.
Take this with you: Don’t reinvent the wheel each time. Develop simple, reusable tools like consent templates, scheduling workflows, and flexible formats that can lower the lift and keep things moving.
Relying too heavily on existing networks or well-worn advisory groups can unintentionally limit access to fresh ideas. When the same types of participants show up, critical perspectives get left out. This doesn’t just narrow the conversation, it risks shaping solutions that overlook or misunderstand the people most affected.
Take this with you: Gathering multiple perspectives doesn’t happen passively. Audit your current networks and ask: Whose realities are these insights reflecting? Then explore new channels such as peer organizations that can open doors to overlooked perspectives.
Working with the same youth networks again and again can create fatigue for participants and for teams. Without fresh perspectives, feedback loops start to stall. What once felt energizing can become repetitive, limiting both insight and momentum.
These challenges aren’t uncommon. But they point to a real need: more sustainable ways to involve young people that are wide-reaching, well-timed, and designed to grow over time, not wear out.
Take this with you: Build a feedback loop with a shelf life. Plan for rotation, rest, and renewal through shorter cycles, rolling cohorts, or switching up the questions you’re asking over time.
The biggest barriers to using youth insight effectively aren’t about intention. They’re structural. It takes capacity, clarity, and systems that can turn input into action. At In Tandem, we provide partners with the infrastructure to gather meaningful insights so their work with young people is sustainable, representative, and built to last.
By connecting organizations and companies to a broader pool of our Youth Partners, managing logistics, and ensuring young people are compensated fairly, we make it easier for organizations to gather insight that sticks and make decisions that hold up.
This isn’t about checking a box. It’s about building better products, policies, and programs with the people most affected by them. And it starts by doing the hard parts better.
See how In Tandem helps teams tap into real youth insight without burning out their staff or relying on the same few perspectives. When organizations build with youth, not just for them, their ideas become stronger and their impact lasts longer.
Ready to take the next step? Discover how In Tandem empowers youth-serving organizations to turn insight into action and create meaningful change.