How Sandbox works: Our Organization Structure

Photo by Perry Grone

In just a year, Sandbox grew from a group of 10 friends working on a few projects to 37 active members developing 7 projects and becoming the hub for software development on campus. It has been extraordinarily exciting to see the organization develop and grow so quickly. At the same time, this quick-paced growth required Sandbox to think about the current and long term organizational structure.

Before we continue, let’s get a quick introduction to Sandbox. We’re Northeastern’s student-led software consultancy with a mission to unleash the power of student driven software. At its core, it’s a community of people deeply passionate about building incredible software. We’re dedicated to making a real impact, empowering each other to learn, and helping each other grow.

Client and Community Projects

There are two distinct branches of Sandbox, client and community, that operate very similarly but serve different clients. The client arm of the organization focuses on building software solutions in tandem with a specific client (researchers, deans, etc). On the other hand, the community arm develops products that are beneficial for the greater Northeastern student body.

Currently, we’re planning on expanding to three branches — but more on this in a future article 🙂

💼 The Sandbox E-board

“ Unleash the power of student-driven software” — Our Mission

Our E-board has two primary functions: to continually work towards our mission and to support members such that they feel empowered to make their impact and have an incredible time doing so.

To do this, we have five roles in E-board:

1. Executive Director: Grow the organization to the next level.
2. Operations Director: Ensure day-to-day operations and experience of members.
3. Technical Director: Ensure project excellence and technical growth of members.
4. Marketing and Events Director: Direct the Sandbox brand and expand our reach.
5. Community Director: Expand Sandbox’s engagement with the rest of the NU community.

At Sandbox, we’ve taken the approach of creating a role only when we see it being a necessity. This has helped Sandbox laser focus on certain objectives and expand at the appropriate time. A great example of this is the recent addition of the Community Director role. We spent our first couple semesters honing in providing the best possible member experience. Once we felt that confident that the Sandbox experience was impactful and fulfilling, we wanted to expand our reach and impact into the greater northeastern community, which is what led us to create the community director position.

🌼 Some Special Roles

Outside of the E-board, we have some special roles to make sure Sandbox operates smoothly. In addition, these roles act as nice stepping stones into other leadership roles on the E-board or as a project lead.

1. Head of Brand: Build and develop the Sandbox brand.
2. Head of Infrastructure: Provide technical support to deploy our projects.
3. Head of Recruiting: Handle all logistics to smoothly recruit the new Sandbox class.
4. Head of UI/UX: Oversee the UI/UX for all projects.

Next semester, we’re hoping to add another role — someone who provides technical support and hosts workshops for all members. This person would essentially serve a similar role as a TA for a class and help drive the personal growth of all members.

🤩 A Typical Sandbox Team

We take pride in that every member is empowered to make a meaningful contribution. Whether you’re an experienced team member, a freshman new to the club, or the project lead, everyone has a role in making a Sandbox team successful.

Photo by Clark Tibbs

👩🏽‍💼 Project Lead

“Being a team lead on Sandbox has really opened my eyes to a new perspective on software development I’d never seen before. Your #1 priority is making sure every team member has the support and structure they need to do their best work, and it’s a totally new and incredibly valuable skill set. It is equally rewarding as it is challenging.” — Mitch (3rd Year Team Lead)

Every team has a project lead whose responsibilities are as follows:

1. Finish deliverables on time
2. Meet project requirements
3. Keep the client/users happy
4. Keep the team happy

The team lead does not necessarily have to be tech lead for a project, but rather take care of project management tasks such as assigning tasks, maintain a working client relationship, and conducting 1 on 1’s with the team members. In addition, we encourage team leads to make themselves available to their team members at least once a week outside of the weekly Sandbox meetings in order to provide support to the team in accomplishing their tasks.

👩‍💻 Member

We believe in small teams with dedicated members all creating a tangible impact on their projects. We’ve found that teams with 3–5 developers allow for the ideal mix of differing perspectives, experience levels, and exciting opportunities while allowing for everyone to walk away at the end of the semester feeling ownership of the project.

Every Sandbox member has some basic responsibilities they agree to:

1. Make a good faith effort to invest around ten hours a week to come to meetings and contribute to my responsibilities.
2. Let my project lead know if I am having trouble meeting expectations, and work with them to make steps towards improvement.
3. Act according to our values: Make an Impact, Learn Together, and Be Kind.
4. During standup, update the team about any blocking issues I face, my goals, and my progress so far.
5. Give the team a 3 day advance notice if I cannot meet a deadline.
6. Communicate with the team if I encounter a blocking issue or need help and reply in a timely manner.
7. Do my best to write readable and well-organized code.

All of these responsibilities are outlined in the social contract. All members work together with their team and team lead to outline what they expect from each other. The responsibilities listed above are just a starting point for members to build upon.

👩🏼‍🎨 Designer

“Design used to be the seasoning you’d sprinkle on for taste; now it’s the flour you need at the start of the recipe.” — John Maeda

We don’t just want our users to use our products, we want our users to love our products. Many people prefer to use SearchNEU over Northeastern’s course catalog simply because it is a much more intuitive system to use. Therefore, we have a dedicated UI/UX designer for every project that has a substantial user interface.

Designers on Sandbox work directly with the team lead and the development team to develop and iterate on their designs. They conduct user surveys and build user personas in order to create the ultimate user experience.

We also have designer roles that work with the Head of Brand to further develop the Sandbox brand by creating graphics for our social media and contributing to our brand book. Currently, these roles are unfilled, but we plan to fill them in the upcoming semester.

🚀 What’s Next?

Currently, our organization structure is intentionally as flat as possible which we believe empowers members to have a genuine sense of ownership of the organization. The flat structure allows us to be agile and allocate resources as needed every semester. Most importantly, it allows everyone to be easily approachable and transparent. We love collaboration and learning together (its one of our values!), and a flat structure removes any unnecessary hurdles to approach anyone in the org. Transparency also becomes easier — each and every member can and should be able to approach any E-board member or team lead to get an update. Although we still have some work in improving our operations in areas like transparency, we believe that we have an organizational structure that allows us to both achieve our mission, while allowing for a fulfilling and impactful experience for our members.

At the same time, we have structured the org in a manner that allows members to gradually grow into management positions. Many of the special head of roles are a great starting point for members that are looking to get more involved and allows them to prove themselves as good leaders. Similarly, becoming a project lead is a great step before being the technical director. Primarily, this kind of structure makes a succession of management easier and we believe that this allows Sandbox to continue to succeed now and in the future.

Speaking of the future…as Sandbox grows and develops, we anticipate the need to expand our organization structure. For example, we expect that we might need a dedicate events team in order to further our community involvement. Similar to how we create E-board roles, we plan on adding these additional roles to the Sandbox organization when we see it being necessary.