Teams and collaboration

You can work alone, with classmates, or in a mixed-discipline squad. The choice is yours, and most challenges allow all three.

But — and this matters — the team format you pick shows up on your credential. A recruiter looking at your portfolio will see whether you shipped that market analysis solo or as part of a four-person team. Both are fine; they signal different things.

The three formats

Solo

You do everything yourself, end to end. Solo submissions read as: "This person can scope, structure, and ship a piece of professional work without supervision."

This is the right format when:

• You want to demonstrate breadth across the whole project (scoping → research → deliverable).
• The challenge is sized to be doable by one person in a reasonable timeframe.
• You're early in your portfolio and want clear, attributable wins.

Classmate pair

You and one peer (typically from the same programme) split the work. Pair submissions read as: "This person can ship in tandem with someone — they negotiated scope, divided up work, and integrated it cleanly at the end."

Right when:

• You and a classmate want to tackle something bigger than either of you would solo.
• The challenge has natural seams (e.g. a market analysis where one of you owns competitive landscape and the other owns financial modelling).
• You want a faster turnaround than solo.

Mixed-discipline squad

A team of three to six, typically spanning more than one discipline (e.g. an engineer + a designer + a business student on a hardware-launch challenge). Squad submissions read as: "This person can work with people whose vocabulary is not their vocabulary."

This is the closest format to what most working teams look like. It's also the format that recruiters from larger companies look hardest at — because it's the format that tests the skill they care most about.

Right when:

• The challenge is genuinely cross-disciplinary (hardware + software + go-to-market; clinical + regulatory + market sizing).
• You want to build the muscle that solo work can't — translating across professional vocabularies.
• You have peers in adjacent programmes you'd want to work with.

What "good" team collaboration looks like

Whether you're a pair or a six-person squad, the same patterns hold.

Divide work along the seams, not down the middle. If two people own halves of a brief that don't talk to each other, you'll integrate badly at the end. Look for natural interfaces and let one person own each side.

Write things down. A shared scoping document, a shared pitch deck, a shared "what we decided this week" page. Verbal-only teams produce inconsistent deliverables.

Name a single editor for the final submission. Group-edited final deliverables tend to read inconsistently — voice changes paragraph to paragraph, the structure drifts. Whoever has the strongest writing or design skill does the final pass.

Surface disagreement early. A team that didn't disagree during scoping almost always disagrees during final submission. Better to argue about scope on day three than about conclusions on day twenty.

Credit and attribution

Every team member gets a credential — but each credential records the team's composition. Your record shows you shipped this brief as part of a team of N, with the role you played. Recruiters reading your profile see this. They prefer it to ambiguity.

If two team members contributed unevenly, the rubric allows reviewers to weight credentials accordingly. This is rare — most teams sort it out before submission — but the option exists.

When teams go wrong

Two failure modes show up most often:

1. The free-rider. A team member who attends meetings but doesn't ship. Surface this early to your other teammates and to your reviewer. Solutions vary — sometimes a smaller team is the answer.
2. The lone wolf. A team member who insists on doing everything themselves and treats other teammates as observers. The fix is the same as the free-rider: surface it. A challenge done solo with a team's name on it is not a team submission.

Both are normal. Both are recoverable if you address them in week one rather than week six.

Next

When the work's done, you ship. See Final submission.