The Project Workbench

The Project Workbench is the page you land on when you open a project (its address is /projects/your-project). It's the home base for a single project: the current loop and phase, the work you've created, and every tool you can reach from here. Everywhere else in Sandbox, when we say "the workbench" we mean this view.

The LEARN stepper

Across the top sits the LEARN stepper — Look & Listen, Elaborate & Evaluate, Adapt & Agree, Run & Register, and Next or Not?. It shows which phase you're viewing and which phase the loop is actually on. Click any phase to look around it; use Advance phase (or Step back) to move the loop itself.

The pills

Below the phase panel, the workbench is organised into collapsible pills. Open ones expand; closed ones stay tucked away until you need them.

• Your Work — everything you've created in the current phase and loop, grouped by type. A collapsed group such as Notes · 3 expands to show those notes. Open by default.
• Workspaces — the loop-wide and phase-specific hubs: the Learnings Matrix, Retrospectives, Interviews, Experiments, Sprint Plans and Prioritization.
• General Tools — the four tools you can use in any phase: Note, Backlog Item, Issue and Risk. They're always here, always laid out the same way, and open by default so they're one click away. Notes can also tag people and link related work — see below.
• Phase Tools — the tools specific to the phase you're viewing (they change as you move through the loop). This is the last pill on the page.

Issue vs Risk

Both are general (any-phase) tools, and both automatically register a matching entry in the Learnings Matrix the moment you create one — no extra step, and no way to opt out.

An Issue is a provisional signal: something worth learning from that might turn into a real problem. Logging one registers a Metric-kind Learning — a thing observed, not yet a confirmed risk.

A Risk is where confirmed, "real" problems and blockers live. Logging one registers a Risk-kind Learning directly.

If an Issue proves out to be an actual ongoing problem, promote it: open the auto-created Learning on the matrix and edit its Type from Metric to Risk. There's no automatic escalation — you decide when an Issue has earned Risk status.

Tagging people and linking work in Notes

Notes double as a lightweight way to communicate inside a project.

@mentions. Type @ in a note's body and a dropdown of project members appears — keep typing to filter, click one to insert their name. Save the note and everyone you tagged gets notified (push if they have it enabled, email otherwise), with a link straight to the note. You can tag yourself too — it's a handy way to leave yourself a reminder. Tagging the same person again on a later edit won't notify them twice; only a genuinely new mention does. Your notifications live in Mentions (the bell icon in the top nav) — visiting it marks everything read.

Linked work. Below the note body, "Linked work" lets you attach a related Interview, Experiment, Learning, Risk, Retrospective, or Sprint Plan — search across every loop in the project, not just the one you're viewing, so you can reference something from an earlier loop for context. Attached items show as chips you can click through to, or remove with the ×. You need to save the note once before you can attach anything to it.

Formatting with Markdown

Every text field across Sandbox's tools supports Markdown — bold, lists, tables, links — and renders formatted wherever you view or export the artifact. Paste a table and Sandbox will tidy up common paste issues (like a stray blank line breaking a table) automatically.

Finding your work later

The workbench shows the current phase and loop. To see everything across a project — or across all your projects — head to Artifacts, the global index that groups and filters every artifact you've made.

Working across loops

A project can run more than one loop at a time. The loop switcher (top-right of the workbench) jumps between them or starts a new one. Managers can move or copy an artifact from Your Work into another active loop.