Real Product, Real Stakes: GSB and Avito Auto’s Gamification Hackathon
When you trade traditional lectures for a high-intensity product hackathon with a market leader you get more than just a grade—you get a collision of creativity, competition, and real business strategy. That’s exactly what more than 200 fourth-year Business Informatics students at HSE Graduate School of Business experienced when they took on a real product challenge from Avito Auto.
From 11 to 17 December, the Technological Entrepreneurship course turned into a product lab. In collaboration with Avito Auto, 41 student teams were given a demanding mission: design, prototype, and defend a gamified concept to engage young users with Avito Auto.
The hackathon kicked off on Thursday afternoon, when Avito experts arrived on campus to present the task and share how the Avito Auto vertical works in practice. Students saw not a textbook example, but a live product challenge with concrete constraints, trade-offs, and risks behind every new feature.
The intensity peaked on Saturday. The campus felt like a startup hub: every classroom and co-working space was filled with teams debating game loops, sketching prototypes, and refining their product story. This wasn’t about having a “cool idea”—it was about making it stand up to two checkpoints with Avito’s product leaders, who pushed teams on user value, mechanics, feasibility, and risks.
By Sunday evening, all teams had submitted a 12-slide deck and a 120-second video pitch. On Monday, a jury of eight Avito specialists from analytics, marketing, and design reviewed 41 solutions. After a rigorous selection process, the Top-10 teams pitched live on Wednesday. The winners impressed the joint jury from Avito and GSB with concepts ranging from AR quests tied to real car listings to social challenges that reward safe driving and smart consumer choices.
The top spot went to team Absolute Cinema, which turned a nostalgic “endless runner” into a business tool. Vladimir explained that their swiping mechanic wasn’t just for fun, but a way to tackle the cold-start problem by quickly training Avito’s recommendation algorithms. Grigory noted the hardest part was aligning different visions under tight deadlines, while Anzhelika emphasized how close friendship and constant communication helped them polish the concept—making the week as much about growth and team spirit as about the final result.
Second place went to team Fellowship, creators of Avito Auto Guess&Go, a gamified ecosystem designed to build loyalty even before a user buys their first car. The concept combined three mechanics: guessing car prices, scanning cars with the camera to estimate value, and a city-based car hunt that turns passive browsing into a habit. Ekaterina noted the hardest part was balancing fun gameplay with real business value, while Julia highlighted how the challenge forced the team to think fast, collaborate tightly, and turn abstract ideas into a structured product concept.
By the end of the week, it was clear that everyone had won something. For students, the hackathon felt like stepping inside a real product team—juggling creativity, data, constraints, and deadlines instead of just talking about them in class. For Avito Auto, it became a way to see marketplaces through the eyes of the next generation and to pressure-test bold concepts faster than any internal workshop could. And for GSB, it was a reminder of what our programmes aim to do at their best: anchor learning in solid theory, shape it through real practice, and make the process demanding, relevant—and genuinely fun.
organizer and GSB faculty
From my side, this hackathon worked exactly the way I hope university–industry collaboration should work: students were genuinely switched on from Thursday to Sunday, Avito Auto got to see thoughtful, well-structured concepts instead of abstract ideas, and GSB stood right in the middle—making sure the format created value for our partner, real learning for our students, and a week that people will remember not just for the pressure, but for the fun.
