Home Competition Stories What made team Trailblazers victorious in Google Case Challenge 2020 - By Kaushik from MDI Gurgaon

What made team Trailblazers victorious in Google Case Challenge 2020 - By Kaushik from MDI Gurgaon

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What made team Trailblazers victorious in Google Case Challenge 2020 - By Kaushik from MDI Gurgaon

The Google Case Challenge is a well-known top-notch competition, and so what is in 2020. Well developed with four rounds each requiring different skills to find the right solution, the competition challenged us to the core.

The first round was a 30-minute online challenge to assess the team's critical thinking and reasoning.
The second round consisted of a case study.
The third round was a cohort round.
The fourth round was the presentation of the final idea.

From the first round to the end we had been working on the same problem and all the rounds were well enough spaced out by Google as everything was done according to the rules and regulations they listed.

Identify the competitor's strength

In the cohort round, the selected teams presented their business solution virtually to a panel of judges. From this round, the two best teams in each cohort (digital marketing, sales and marketing, digital analytics) qualified for the finals. A total of six teams made it to the final. We, Trailblazers, were one of the qualified teams. From our digital marketing cohort, we knew our competing team was from MICA and we were very impressed with their creative work. Thus, we considered them our toughest competitors and prepared ourselves accordingly.

Effective team-working and strategic planning

Our strength as a team was that we had all worked together before and knew each other's weaknesses. With that in mind, we pushed each other through the two-month preparation journey effectively. Conflicts are everywhere, so did we have, but mutual respect being our core strength, we peacefully resolved to reach out to a solution that satisfies everyone.

Our planning strategy was straightforward as we were always ready to work within a certain time frame. We did timely research, brainstorming and storyboarding sessions and utilised our leisure time in research and brainstorming sessions. We especially made sure we had enough time to come up with solutions to our peers and refined sources before the final deadline so that changes could be incorporated on time.

Deal with challenges mindfully

The biggest challenge was understanding the requirements and then meeting them. We had faced difficulty in putting all the research and credible information we found for our solution into 10 slides that answered all queries. The most difficult task was to include the bombardment of feedback we had received from all sorts of sources (even after semifinals) without breaking the core idea of what we were trying to sell. It was pretty daunting, but we finally got it right.

Hard work pays off

With the entire hard work that we had put in, we were confident of entering the top three. Constant messages over group chats about latest updates kept us on our toes. A moment of heart failure was almost there when MICA got the second position, as with that we lost our winning hope. But what came as a cherishable shock was the announcement of Trailblazers as the winner of Google Case Challenge 2020. That moment was a complete mix of despair and joy.

Key takeaways

The biggest reason the team succeeded was perseverance. There were times when we sat on calls for days and couldn't think of a way to make the slides better, but we did it and that paid off in the end. The most rewarding thing is to have teammates that can motivate you throughout the competition. And when it comes to presenting your idea in front of judges, it is significant to present it in such a way that it keeps them captivated the whole time.