Purdue’s Team Powerpuff Girls — comprised of Shreya Sen and Tushar Sivaraman Vibhish  — recent graduates of Purdue’s Master of Engineering Management (MEM) program — and Shubham Kumar, who will graduate in December, secured an impressive second-place finish at the 2025 Johns Hopkins Product Management Club Hackathon. 

The hackathon provided participants with opportunities to deepen their product management knowledge, expand their networks, and gain hands-on experience — key skills for becoming impactful product managers capable of delivering both socially and economically meaningful solutions. 

This year’s challenge consisted of two rounds that asked teams to develop a comprehensive product management framework to validate product-market fit for emerging technologies. 

Team Powerpuff Girls stood out with their Round 1 (Purdue level) innovative proposal aimed at bridging the skills gap and promoting the mental well-being of international graduate students. In Round 2 (inter-university level) teams were asked to build a product-market fit validation framework for emerging technologies — a separate, standalone challenge. 

The team reflected on their experience, sharing how the MEM program equipped them not only to succeed in the competition but also to confidently step into their future careers in product management.

Why did you decide to enter the Hackathon?

We saw it as a great opportunity to challenge ourselves and apply what we’ve been learning in the MEM program. The problem statement was interesting, and we wanted to test our product thinking skills in a real-world situation. It also gave us a chance to work together as a team, learn from others and come up with something that could actually help people. 

What were your roles? 

• Shreya focused on defining the core problem and the customer pain points. She made sure we had a clear direction and always reminded us to think from the user’s point of view. 

• Shubham worked on how we would test and validate our ideas. He built out the experiment structure, defined the success metrics and brought everything together into a usable framework. 

• Tushar handled how the framework could be applied across different situations — like hardware vs. software or B2B vs. B2C — and how teams could use it again and again. 

How did you tackle this challenge? Why did you choose Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man as a model? 

We started by looking at existing product-market fit methods, but many felt either too general or too focused on startups alone. That’s when we thought of a more structured yet flexible approach. 

The Vitruvian Man stood out to us because it represents balance between logic and creativity, structure and flexibility. That’s exactly what we needed in a product validation framework. We built our model around the idea that every part of product validation has a purpose — strategy (head), real customer value (heart), testing (hands), decision-making (feet), adaptability (circle) and repeatability (square). 

Why is it important to combine upskilling and mental health support?

We’ve all felt how stressful the job search can be especially as international students. Learning new skills is important, but it’s just as important to feel emotionally supported during that journey. If someone is struggling mentally, it’s hard for them to stay motivated and focused. We believe that any solution for young professionals should support both career growth and emotional well-being. 

What did you learn from your entry? What do you hope to do with your findings? 

We learned that having a clear structure to validate product ideas makes a big difference. It helps teams avoid guesswork and stay focused. But we also saw how important it is to listen to real users — not just rely on data. We’re hoping to polish the framework and perhaps share it as a toolkit that others in the MEM community or early-stage startups could try out. 

How will what you’ve learned be applied in your future careers? 

This experience taught us how to approach complex problems by breaking them down, validating assumptions, and thinking from both a user and business perspective. These are skills we’ll carry forward in any product or business role we take on. We’ve also learned how valuable teamwork and good communication are when solving open-ended challenges. 

What are your future goals?

We are working toward roles where we can build products that solve real problems. We want to work in environments where we can keep learning, lead teams, and bring both structure and empathy into the product development process. 

How did Purdue Engineering and the MEM program prepare you for your future careers? 

It taught us to speak three dialects in the same sentence: technical feasibility, business viability and user desirability. It helped us learn how to think like both engineers and managers. Courses like systems thinking and product development gave us the foundation we needed. And beyond the classroom, the hackathon gave us a space to apply those lessons in a creative and fast-paced way. 

What hands-on exposure did MEM provide? 

The MEM program gave each of us the foundation to apply our skills in real industry settings through internships:

• Shubham worked as a product manager intern at SharkNinja, where he helped improve usability of consumer products and is currently interning at GlobalFoundries supporting product and market strategy in the semiconductors space. 

• Shreya gained experience as an IT enterprise project manager at Entegris and as a business process analyst at ASML, where she helped optimize global operations and systems. 

• Tushar worked as an energy sales engineer at Tesla, where he contributed to energy product growth through customer-focused technical sales.

These hands-on experiences helped us bring real-world context to the skills we developed during the MEM program.

What was the most important thing you learned as a Purdue MEM student?

The biggest takeaway is that solving problems isn’t just about finding the right answer — it’s about asking the right questions first. We also learned the importance of working across different domains, listening to diverse views and making decisions based on both data and real user feedback.