abbado
An AI coordinator for university student teams. It helps with the part of group work nobody sees: everything between getting the brief and handing it in.
The problem
Group projects tend to fail the same way. One person ends up carrying the team, quiet people get talked over, and small conflicts grow in silence until the deliverable breaks.
Most of it happens in the stretch between the brief and the hand-in, when no one is really looking.
Research
I interviewed 11 students and professors. A few patterns kept coming up:
- Silence. People keep quiet to avoid friction.
- Stolen credit. Loud voices win; quiet work disappears.
- Invisible work. Organisers do more, for the same grade.
- A timing gap. Conflicts start early, but professors notice late.
Conflicts started in weeks 2 to 4, but professors didn't notice until weeks 7 to 8. That gap is the reason abbado exists.
Three people summed up what I found: Montse, the organiser who burns out; Agatha, who gets talked over; and Felix, the professor who only sees the final result.
Design decisions
Visibility without surveillance. A professor needs to see how a team is doing, but the moment students feel watched they stop being honest. So the professor sees team health and never the person behind it. No roles, nobody named.
- 4 questions, not 30. A short, adaptive quiz maps you to a team role, instead of a long personality test.
- Health by deadlines. It tracks what's due, so a team behind on what matters can't hide behind a pile of small wins.
- Role logic is deterministic. The matching runs on fixed rules, not the model. Same answers, same role, every time, and you can check why.
- A chat that knows your context. Running on Mistral, it already knows your role and tasks. It facilitates and stays out of the actual work, and it never picks your team for you.
What I built
A real, deployed app, not a Figma mockup, with 656 automated tests behind it.
- 4-question onboarding and a Belbin role for each student.
- The brief broken into tasks, shared out by profile.
- A live dashboard with team health, alerts and the chat.
- A shared process report at the end.
Honest about testing: I validated the matching logic with a 1,000-team simulation, which showed around 60 to 70% less friction. That’s simulation, not real users yet. Next is a real classroom pilot, plus Canvas and Moodle.
What I learned
The decision I’m proudest of was what I left out. Most of the design work went into deciding what the professor would never get to see. In the end, privacy wasn’t a feature I bolted on. It was the answer to the problem itself.