Academic literature has extensively discussed global virtual teams (GVT) as an emerging organizational form in the world of multinationals and since the pandemic, also beyond. To facilitate our business students competence development, we developed a comprehensive, complex and dynamic instructional design in form of a learning lab. By developing an instructional device in form of a web-based application, we enable individual students and teams to monitor their performance in GVTs in relation to a set of key measures, which serve students to review their learning process, revise their activities in real time and create opportunities for interventions in teams. Hence, the purpose of our study aims at understanding how the application supports learning in the context of our instructional design. Using qualitative content analysis on 44 retrospective essays written by participants, we are able to document and assess students’ learning development in terms of task-, relationship- and process-related competencies. The results highlight important implications how students learn and how we know that from various learning theories’ perspectives.