The Thrill of the Pitch

Every year, the Kilts Case Competition gives Booth students the opportunity to work on a real-world challenge for a sponsoring company and build marketing skills important to jobs in product, brand, and general management. This year, the sponsor was the creative software company Adobe, headquartered in San Jose, California.

For the first round, Adobe gave a simple directive to 21 student teams: Pitch something creative that the company may want to use as a product.

Nahoom and her teammates Belema Hart and Bettye Igbenebor, AB ’25, created a video pitching an AI tool that would give Adobe users specific ideas on how to build their own videos. They had fun creating it, especially since Nahoom and Hart had both studied theater during undergrad.

Team Be was accepted into the second round to pitch on competition day, along with seven other teams. “I think the judges appreciated how much energy we brought to the competition,” Nahoom says.

For the second round, teams were told to focus on adding a feature to either Adobe Express, a content creation app, or Adobe Acrobat, a PDF manager.  Teams had one week to create their pitch before presenting it to judges—including Adobe employees.

It was an exciting time for everyone on Team Be. They all wanted to succeed and give the pitch their best shot, using strategic thinking and creativity to build a solution. But putting together the presentation was often stressful.

“Focusing on one idea was difficult,” Hart says, as they all had good, unique ideas, and Adobe’s product ecosystem is expansive.

Ultimately, Team Be decided to pitch a new feature for Adobe Express called “Adobe Workspace.” The idea was to create a cloud connection between all of Adobe’s apps, akin to a shared drive in Google, making it easier for business users to share information across the entire ecosystem.

As they worked, the team grew more confident. “The experience was fast paced, highly collaborative, and energizing,” Hart says. “It pushed me to connect big-picture strategy with the human needs behind it.”

While Team Be didn’t win, Nahoom says that the competition gave her invaluable experience in marketing innovation and strategy.

Now, she understands the patience it takes to work with others on a big problem. She also saw the analytical side of marketing applied to a real-world case. And while it was a difficult process, Nahoom enjoyed seeing herself and her teammates grow and become more confident as the competition went on. 

Enjoying the experience is key to pitching a product, Chan says. Anyone who pitches in a future Kilts Case Competition must know that having fun and showing conviction for their idea helps it shine.

“If you’re not excited about your own solution or enjoying the process, it will always show in your final presentation,” Chan says.

More than anything, Nahoom saw the power of learning by doing. One of the biggest lessons she learned: Be confident in your work and avoid comparison with others.

“I learned to not look at other people’s ideas and say that theirs are better than mine,” she says. “We wanted to try something different that we felt good about. When you’re pitching, that’s what matters.”