➢ The Product Owner Marathon is an annual talent-development program designed to introduce university students to one of the most in-demand modern roles in technology the product owner and to give them a competitive, hands-on environment in which to test themselves against it. The program is run in partnership between PASHA Bank, one of Azerbaijan's leading corporate financial institutions, and SUP.VC as the organising partner. Each edition brings together third- and fourth-year students from across the country's leading universities, organised into teams that work on startup ideas, develop minimum viable products, and compete for the title of product owner under the mentorship of PASHA Bank's senior in-house product owners. The second edition gathered 16 teams from 8 universities across a two-month working sprint, and was won by team VirtualGems.

The brief

➢ The product owner is one of the highest-demand roles in modern technology organisations, and one of the hardest to staff in any market. The role sits at the intersection of business, design, and engineering, and the only reliable way to develop it is hands-on practice with feedback from senior practitioners. For PASHA Bank a bank running multiple agile product squads inside its digital banking business the long-term pipeline for this role cannot be solved by recruitment alone. It has to be built. The challenge was to design a program that could expose serious university students to the discipline of product ownership, give them a competitive arena to practise it, surface the strongest candidates for the bank's broader talent pipeline, and do all of this with the credibility and rigour of an industry-grade program rather than a student club exercise.

Why PASHA Bank partnered with SUP.VC

➢ PASHA Bank has the in-house product expertise. What it does not run in-house is the program infrastructure university outreach across the country, team formation, structured curriculum, mentor coordination, jury management, and the operational discipline of running a multi-week competition that holds student teams to a professional standard. PASHA Bank partnered with SUP.VC for the same reason corporates around the world rely on specialist innovation operators for talent programs: the corporate brings the technical depth, the mentors, and the brand pull; the innovation partner brings the program operating system. SUP.VC contributed end-to-end program design, the university and student outreach that built the applicant pool across multiple cities and institutions, team formation and competition operations across both editions, and the ongoing operational discipline that turns a one-time event into a recurring program now in its second iteration.

How the program works

➢ The Product Owner Marathon is structured as a competition. Applications are open to third- and fourth-year university students, who apply in teams and are selected to participate based on academic and motivational criteria. Selected teams are then taken through a multi-week program four weeks in the first edition, expanded to two months in the second in which they develop a startup idea from concept to a working minimum viable product. Throughout the program, PASHA Bank's senior product owners participate as instructors and mentors, sharing the practical methodology, frameworks, and case experience they use inside the bank's own agile squads. Teams progress through evaluation stages, with the strongest advancing to the final, where the winning team receives a prize of 2,500 AZN. The second edition involved 16 teams drawn from 8 universities, and the title was awarded to team VirtualGems.

What PASHA Bank gained

➢ The first outcome is a talent pipeline for one of the bank's hardest-to-fill roles. Each cohort surfaces a group of young, technically literate, motivated students who have already spent two months practising the discipline of product ownership under the mentorship of the bank's own seniors. For a bank that runs digital product squads at scale, this is a structured way to identify and develop future hires before the open market does. The second outcome is brand positioning in the early-career market. Azerbaijan's strongest university students apply broadly across banks and tech companies, and the institution that engages them earliest tends to win them. By running a recurring, branded program with real mentorship and real prize money, PASHA Bank moves from being a name on a careers page to being the institution that taught them the discipline they want to practise. This is a long-term recruiting asset that competitors do not have. The third outcome is internal capability development. Running a program as an instructor forces senior product owners to articulate their methodology, refine their frameworks, and engage with practitioners outside the bank's own teams.

➢ The instructors gain as much as the students, and the bank's internal product practice strengthens with each edition. The fourth outcome is category leadership. Product ownership as a discipline is still emerging in Azerbaijan, and most universities do not yet teach it in any structured way. By running this program in partnership with the country's universities, PASHA Bank effectively becomes the institution most associated with the discipline at the national level a positioning that compounds across recruiting, partnerships, and policy.