Winners of Burning Heroes PM Contest 2023

Anastasiia Moskovchenko Shares Insights from Her Product Management Career

Burning Heroes PM is a world-wide competition for product managers. StartupReporter.eu has previously covered Burning Heroes Association. The contest of Burning Heroes PM was held in Africa and Middle-East in November, 2023.

The winner, Anastasiia Moskovchenko, Senior Product Manager at Phillips, has agreed to talk about her journey, as well as share some insights on how participation in contests can help you become a successful product manager. 

Anastasiia Moskovchenko: – I first learned about Burning Heroes as a pitch competition for startups. I pitched my idea but didn’t get selected. However, I still decided to come to watch the competition and introduce myself to the organizers.

This is where I learned that BH also started to host the product management case-based contest, and I was immediately drawn in. During 5 years of my product management experience, I’ve never heard of anything similar and wanted to participate. 

Contest task: disrupting help desk

The Burning Heroes PM contest consisted of 3 categories of cases, proposed by Expert Dojo, co.brick and Gumy and company. 

First, the participants were to choose a task from several options and apply for the competition with your deck pitch. Then, a panel of judges would review their cases and select winners in each category. 

What we needed to do was to come up with a project that would tackle a disrupt help desk. 

This is usually understood as a support system inside the company, an internal help desk that helps with onboarding and orienting yourself inside the company during your first days. 

I decided to conduct deep interviews with some of my friends from a big tech company. Those interviews helped me realize that there are many established solutions already implemented for enterprises. However, I thought that startups also face the same challenge. Even more so, as they can’t afford expensive software, and that software is often targeted at much bigger-scale teams and processes than those that exist inside a startup. So I decided to make an AI-supported help desk for startups called AIssist. 

Source: Anastasiia Moskovchenko

Several things are important to keep in mind. Solution should be: 

• convenient for small teams;
• affordable;
• easy to integrate with different working tools such as Zoom and Jira.

These problems could be solved with the introduction of artificial intelligence that would automate many routine tasks such as 

After coming up with the concept and conducting research, I needed to come up with the business plan, roadmap, and go-to-market strategy. These are typical product manager’s tasks, so in that sense, the contest was very efficient at evaluating some real practical skills. 

Source: Anastasiia Moskovchenko

I have prepared a presentation of 12 slides that would summarize the key ideas of the project, its potential on the market, target audience, possible risks, monetization strategy, and so on. I have presented my idea on a 1 on 1 call with one of the experts.

The most difficult part about this competition was that the initial task was very broad. You could understand it in several different ways. I chose a risky path going with startups but the interviews with real people have shown me that the problem for these companies is quite acute. 

Source: Anastasiia Moskovchenko

Another problem was searching for information. As a product manager creating a new product, you need to do a ton of market research and understand very well the demands of the users, as well as know all details about your competitors. I have used AI tools such as Perplexity that have helped me to analyze a lot reports and studies much faster. Without them, it would take several days to go through all the info but, with them, it only took about 5 hours. 

Participation in contests: yay or nay?

Participating in contests and hackathons can be very good for both beginners and seasoned professionals. 

Firstly, judges and organizers are often representatives of companies that are looking for talent. For example, at BH PM contest, there were companies like Booking, Telegram, Glove, Meetup, and other global enterprises. It’s much easier to attract their attention than by sending them your CV. If they like what you do, you can get a job offer right on the spot. 

Secondly, you, as a future employee, will have a much better understanding of what kind of people work at a company and what kind of projects they have if you participate in the activities that they organize. Competitions like this can help you to understand what you actually like, for example, if you prefer to work with B2B or B2C. This is a pain-free way to understand whether there is a match between you and your potential employer.

I wasn’t looking for a job, but I still consider the networking aspect quite important. Participating in various events is also a great opportunity to expand your horizons, learn something new, and gain new experience. Having broad expertise and a good understanding of the market is important for product managers, as you can borrow something from different fields than your own, such as monetization strategies, marketing strategies and interesting features.