Three years in a row, three MBA students from the David Eccles School of Business have competed in the final round of the annual Adobe Analytics Challenge. In that time, The University of Utah has been one of only two programs to consistently reach the finals. This year, Full-Time MBA students Cameron Rigby, Chandler Bush, and Phillip Fuchs received first place, returning home with a $35,000 prize.
After a decade of successful competitions, Adobe partnered with T-Mobile for this year’s challenge. Benefiting from hype surrounding T-Mobile’s customer-focused culture and its growth in recent years (including collaborations with Netflix and Apple and a planned merger with Sprint), participation in the Adobe Analytics Challenge also grew, drawing 170 participating teams from over 100 schools across the nation to find a customer-focused solution to a data-driven case.
Teams are given a problem and large sets of real-world data from T-Mobile and are told to solve the problem using Adobe’s products. The key to success doesn’t solely lie in data analytics, however, as the University of Utah team (nicknamed The Red Bulls) demonstrated. “You can have complex analysis and amazing visualizations, but executives will be most interested if you can tell a story that leads to insights with dollar signs,” says MBA candidate Cameron Rigby (‘20).
The team’s backgrounds contributed to their ability to approach the problem in an interdisciplinary way. Chandler Bush (‘20) attributed their success to the diversity of skills on the team: “Our team dynamic is definitely the main contributor to our success… between the three of us we have the perfect blend of soft, strategic, and technical skills.” Combining talents in marketing, analytics, and human resources, the Red Bulls were able to navigate data and present a unique solution to T-Mobile.
This year, a total of 170 teams entered the competition, seven of which came from the David Eccles School of Business Full-Time MBA cohort. Of the seven University of Utah teams, two made it to the semifinals, and the Red Bulls moved in to the final round, giving them an opportunity to present a case solution to members of the Adobe and T-Mobile company. Adobe and T-Mobile guaranteed interviews to all finalists in the competition and over $60,000 in cash awards for a team’s composed solution to positively affect the T-Mobile customer experience.
To learn more, please visit adobeanalyticschallenge.com.