Project Team Role Descriptions

This book covers the responsibilities of Blueprint Tech Leads (TL), Product Managers (PM), Designers and Developers.

• Technical Lead (TL)
• Product Manager (PM)
• Designer
• Developer
• Project Team Goals
• Speech Guide Questions Elections 2026

Technical Lead (TL)

As the role implies, you will be the primary leader for your project, and the Executive Team will be here to support you with anything you might need! Your responsibilities include:

• Project Scoping: Meet with the non-profit organization to understand their project needs and determine the appropriate tech stack, given their requirements and your team’s abilities. The VP Projects and your Product Manager will be available to support you throughout this stage. You will also be expected to meet consistently with the NPO to ensure that you are meeting their requirements. 

• Project Planning: The goal is to implement an Agile (Scrum) project methodology that emphasizes iterative development, frequent communication, and team collaboration to deliver high-quality products. Setting bi-weekly goals for your developers and dividing features into manageable tasks will help enable consistent progress.

• Building Team Culture: Blueprint and its teams should be seen as more than just a “job”. While the work may be challenging, we want this to be an enjoyable experience for all of those involved. The Exec Team will host GBMs and events throughout the semester to help build the culture within Blueprint as a whole. While most of your team’s work may be done asynchronously, implementing practices such as pair programming, or hosting live in-person work sessions can prevent your team from feeling isolated.

More detail and specific resources will be added to this page!

Product Manager (PM)

As a Product Manager, your responsibilities include:

• NPO Communication: You will be your team's primary channel of communication with the assigned non-profit organization (NPO). You are responsible for ensuring that your team is meeting the NPO’s specifications. One important tip is to consider guiding the discussion from the target user’s perspective.

• Project Planning: The goal is to implement an Agile (Scrum) project methodology. Alongside your Technical Lead, you will assist in the bi-weekly/monthly planning to ensure that your team meets your goals.

• Building Team Culture: As much as this is an opportunity to develop something tangible, it is also an opportunity to be part of a community where we can learn from each other! At the end of the day, your team members are students, and we want everyone’s experience to be rewarding and fun. While most of your team’s work may be done asynchronously, implementing practices such as pair programming, or hosting live in-person work sessions can prevent your team from feeling isolated.

• (Optional) Developing: The product manager is a leadership role, so the aforementioned responsibilities would be expected, however you are more than welcome to assist in the developing to help build your own skill set and be more informed about the project.

In progress: More detail & resources coming soon!

Designer

The designer plays a crucial role in the project and is responsible for guiding the frontend layout of the project. As a designer, your responsibilities include:

• Wireframes and Styling Guides: You will create wireframes (mock-up layouts of the application requested) and decide styling using any method you’re comfortable with. Keep in mind, you will be working closely with the Product Manager to ensure your designs fall under the NPO’s interests/branding, but we still encourage you to be creative with it!

• Content: You will confirm all the content being displayed on the website with the NPO. (The NPO should handle the bulk of this.) This could range from text, images, and additional graphics.

• (Optional) Developing: As a Designer your main responsibilities are what are outlined above. Nonetheless, you are more than welcome to assist in the development to help build your own skill set and be more informed about the project!

In progress: More detail & resources coming soon!

Developer

Developers constitute the backbone of every project team. As a developer, your responsibilities include:

• Implementing Features: The specific technical skills you need will be dependent on your project specs, but as we are expecting to build web-based applications, general frontend and backend skills are necessary. Though projects will come with their unique learning curves, your team is balanced with diverse skills, and your Technical Lead will try their best to ensure you are working on something that you are both comfortable and interested in!

• Practicing Agile Methodology: Agile is a project management methodology that emphasizes iterative development, frequent communication, and team collaboration to deliver high-quality products. This is used amongst many tech companies, but no worries if you are unfamiliar with it: we’ll be teaching and practicing this with our projects!

• Documentation: Not only is it important for yourself and your team to understand the components of your project, but your documentation will be key in the hand-off process to the NPOs.

In progress: More detail & resources coming soon!

Project Team Goals

Context & Objective

The objective of this semester is to identify metrics to accurately measure development velocity across all project teams, while ensuring that engineering effort translates directly into high-value features delivered to our nonprofit partners.

Success is defined not only by output (PRs, commits), but by cycle time, participation breadth, and impact on NPO-requested functionality.

This document follows the GQM (Goal–Question–Metric) framework to ensure metrics remain actionable and aligned with real outcomes.

Goals

G1. Accurately Measure Development Velocity per Team and per Developer

Identify metrics that accurately measure development velocity, and identify potential areas of improvement.

G2. Broaden Engineering Participation

Reduce bottlenecks caused by over-reliance on tech leads by increasing meaningful contributions from all developers.

G3. Maximize NPO Value Delivery

Prioritize and complete issues that directly map to NPO needs, reducing time-to-value.

G4. Improve Delivery Predictability

Enable project leads and NPOs to reliably anticipate feature delivery timelines.

Key Questions

Velocity & Flow

• How quickly are teams converting issues into merged code?
• Where are bottlenecks occurring (review, implementation, unclear requirements)?

Participation

• Are contributions evenly distributed across team members?
• Are non-tech-lead members actively reviewing and owning issues?

NPO Impact

• How many completed issues directly correspond to NPO-requested features?
• How long does it take to deliver an NPO-requested feature end-to-end?
• How quickly are NPO-requested features transformed from identified needs into deployed, usable solutions for the partner?

Process Health

• Are teams consistently engaging in standups and NPO syncs?
• Are tasks being created and closed at a sustainable pace (number of created issues is closely similar to number of closed issues)?

Weekly Metrics

Velocity Metrics

• Number of pull requests merged per team
• Number of pull requests merged per developer
• Average PR cycle time (open → merged)
• Number of issues closed per team
• Issue closure rate (closed / created per week)

Participation Metrics

• Number of created pull requests per team
• % of team members with ≥1 PR per week
• Number of PRs reviewed by non-tech-lead members
• Review participation distribution (to detect review bottlenecks).
• Average time to give out a code review per team and per member
• Estimate time to code an issue, and correlate it with task difficulty

NPO Value Metrics

• Number of issues labeled as NPO-Feature closed per week
• Average time to close NPO-Feature issues
• NPO meeting summary → linked issues created

Process & Engagement Metrics

• Standup meeting notes summary (auto-generated)
• NPO meeting summary
• Per-team attendance rate
• Historical per-member attendance rate
• % of attendees who pushed a commit or opened a PR that week

Automation

Velocity & Participation Automation

• Weekly GitHub report per team:
  • PRs merged
  • PRs opened
  • Issues created / closed
  • Cycle time averages
• Per-developer activity summary sent to project leads

Accountability & Alerts

• Alarms for team members with no PR activity for > 2 weeks
• Alerts for:
  • PRs open > 7 days
  • Issues stalled with no activity > 10 days
• Team-level alerts when issue creation outpaces closures
• Team-level alerts when no new issues are created

NPO Value Tracking

• Auto-link NPO meeting notes
• Weekly report:
  • “NPO value delivered this week” (Send to NPO as weekly update, LinkedIn)
  • Issues closed that directly map to partner requests
• End-of-semester summary:
  • Features shipped per NPO
  • Average time-to-value per project

Expected Outcomes

By the end of Spring 2026, this framework should result in:

• Faster, more predictable feature delivery
• Higher contribution rates from non-lead developers
• Clear, measurable alignment between engineering output and NPO impact
• Reduced burnout and review bottlenecks
• Data-driven project retrospectives instead of anecdotal feedback

Speech Guide Questions Elections 2026

This document will reflect some of the pressing problems faced during your the executive board this past year. Use the following questions to guide your speech.

President Miguel Merlin

• How would you redefine Blueprint’s culture?

• Where do you see Blueprint in 5 years?

• How would you deal with the lack of diversity in the club? (Mostly CS majors, the club is heavily dominated)

• What new initiatives would you push for during your presidency?

VP Projects Brandon Yen

• What do you think is the biggest bottleneck of project teams, and how would you solve it?

• What would you do if a Non-Profit organization stops responding half-way through the project?

VP Design Ivan Farfan Diaz

• How would you scale up the design team to work with 4 Non-Profit organizations?

• How would you go about recruiting designers going forward?

VP Operations Lucas Ha

• How would you encourage interdisciplinary collaboration in the e-board?

• How would you ensure decisions are made faster within the organization?

VP Marketing Ananya Shrivastava

• How would you increase the presence on campus of Blueprint?

VP Recruitment Harris Hamid

• How would you increase the presence of Blueprint in corporate settings?

• What tweaks would you make to the student recruitment process?

• What is the ideal NPO for Blueprint?

VP Finance SAHANA ALI

• How would you guarantee that all the club subscription needs are met?

VP Talent Development Nishit Sharma

• How would you increase the outflow of Tech Team members to project teams?

• How would you increase student retention rates for the Tech Team?

• What tweaks would you make to the current Tech Team set up?

VP Engineering Dominic Magats

• How would you go about providing support to past NPOs?

• What projects do you have in mind for Blueprint in the future?

• How would you go about managing a team of 10+ developers with different projects in progress?