During the first month of B-School when I asked my seniors what was one thing that we should concentrate on most after academics, everyone said the same thing - case competitions. Case competitions are the best way to develop presentation skills, develop group working habits & in the process, earn monetary and non-monetary awards including PPIs & PPOs.
And so, I started working on applying to as many case competitions as possible. But after many disappointments, my first win came when my team - Puzzles became the campus winners at Xiaomi's Mi Summit case competition. Ours was a two-member team consisting of Srishti Sachdeva - who had done her BBA in marketing & me who had worked in sales for three years.
The competition was based on developing a new product that can make use of the entire Mi ecosystem. We were given the task to develop the entire GTM strategy for the product in the competition. Being HR students, we had to learn how to do it & what are the intricacies that are taken into consideration while developing a new product in the electronics industry. We used our experiences and spoke to stakeholders including shop owners to understand what were the primary buying criteria for customers and what were the key things that were important to the business owners. Accordingly, we brainstormed for two weeks and developed a product that merged perfectly with the ecosystem.
During our preliminary rounds, we had to pitch to the senior marketing team at Xiaomi & we prepared a deck on how best Xiaomi could leverage their skills as the market leader and increase adoption of the product. We had also prepared a complete marketing and product strategy, including the price points for the product. We even backed what we had put in our slides by the use of primary and secondary research done.
The judges during their Q&A appreciated the depth of the presentation & consequently declared us the winners from XLRI Jamshedpur. This case competition helped develop a foundation for many upcoming competitions. The learnings from what we could have done better in our presentation was something that we applied to our academic projects as well as during internship projects.
