Advanced Case Frameworks with Former McKinsey Consultant Lisa Bright

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Advanced Case Frameworks Transcript:

Welcome back to Strategy Simplified.

We know that a lot of you listening are aiming for a consulting role, whether it's your first one or your next one.

And that's where today's episode comes in.

To pass the case interview and get an offer, you have to move beyond the basics and one of the most important categories inside the case interview is frameworks.

In today's episode, former McKinsey consultant Lisa Bright is also a top rated case coach with over 10,000 hours of helping candidates ace case interviews.

She walks through an advanced case frameworks master class.

In this session, Lisa goes over advanced case openings.

She talks about the anatomy of a case.

She talks about structure overview.

She does a deep dive on the market study framework, which is one of the most important frameworks you need to know, and then she ends with a practice plan.

Check out the video of this at the link in this episode's show notes for a little bit of a more in depth look.

Intro

Thank you for tuning in.

Let's get into this case master class.

So let's dive into the anatomy of a case just really briefly.

Most of you have probably seen this on this call if you've looked at any of the MC materials, but we have a brief breakdown of the elements of the case, right?

So you start off with your interviewer reading you the background.

You're going to do a recap of that and then ask some questions and confirm your objective.

So I'm going to call that the opening of the case.

We're briefly going to look at how you do those parts really effectively leading up into the grand pause and the game plan, right?

Pause to Structure

So the grand pause being the two minutes you're going to take to structure your actual approach, and then the game plan where you're going to present that to your interviewer.

OK, so that's going to start you off well.

And then you'll dive into the heart of your case, right, which is a mix of math questions, creative questions, and then summarizing things.

So let's dive into this opening component really briefly.

As I said, great structures start with great recaps and great clarifying questions.

So let's talk about the recap first.

It's your first impression on your interviewer, and so you want to make sure you're enthusiastically diving into that prompt.

The Recap

You don't want to sound like you're being tortured to be there, right?

One good way to do that is through some personal anecdotes, right?

So, you know, this sounds really interesting.

I've worked in this industry before or hey, I have not actually done anything in this industry, but I'm really excited to learn and dive in, right?

So something to relate to the case, sounds like you're really excited to be there to solve it.

Synthesis vs Summary

The second thing is synthesis versus summary.

And this is definitely more of an advanced recap tactic summary, literally kind of repeating what you've heard in your own words versus a synthesis, being actually able to pull some insights or some opinions, your thoughts about that prompt.

So we'll look at an example of that here in a second.

And then ultimately, if you do a good recap, that should help you formulate a hypothesis moving forward that you will use to then drive the case.

So we're going to take a look at actually one of my favorite prompts and we're actually going to look at structuring this a bit later.

So I'm not going to go ahead and I'm not going to read it to you, but you guys can go ahead and read it.

I'm going to give you about a minute here and then I want you to go ahead and type into chat.

What's your hypothesis?

So what do you think?

The answer to this is?

Don't hit enter yet, but just read through the prompts and type in your hypothesis.

And I'll tell you when to hit enter here in about a minute.

Practice

All right, guys should be typing in your hypotheses and go ahead and hit enter.

So if you had to bet on the answer of the case, where do you think it's going?

OK, we got one.

Cutting expenses, diversified revenue streams.

All right, all right, let's get a few more in there.

Any other thoughts?

All right, I'm actually going to take a look at the one that I think it's Rashawn, I believe you mentioned.

Example

So diversify revenue streams, expand product lines or geographies.

So that one I would say is pretty close to my hypothesis.

Well, diversify pricing, customer segmentation.

All right, so we've got a mix.

We have quite a few different hypotheses.

Let's break this one down.

So I'm going to give you guys a quick recap of how I would recap the case back to the interviewer.

First, I'd say something like, oh, this is a really interesting case.

I actually have a 200 LB dog, so I actually did purchase a lot of dog food.

So it's home for me personally.

Niche Market

But in terms of the case from what I gathered, our client is a manufacturer of premium dog food which is sold exclusively in pet stores and vet clinics.

So they're somewhat in a niche market currently.

I would say limited in terms of premium only and and two limited channels, $500 million in sales.

So sizable business revenue growth has been steady 10% annually for the past 15 years.

That is phenomenal growth, right, Double digits for 15 years.

They've done something quite well for the last two years.

We're seeing a slowing to 2% annual growth.

That's a pretty big drop, right?

Identifying a Problem

But you can't grow at 10% forever.

So that might be as the business, as the business grows, maybe we're seeing that slowing of growth for a reason.

Now the CEO has a target of hitting $800 million in annual sales in three years and our ones are helped to get there.

So 500 to 800, three, 100 million in growth on a base of 500, so 60% in three years, right?

So we're talking about 20% per year, assuming no compounding.

That's a really aggressive growth target, right?

It's double what they've achieved in the past, which was already quite good.

So I'm assuming we're going to have to do something kind of new or aggressive to hit that target.

So that would be my recap of the case.

Not Just Summarizing

I'm not just summarizing.

I'm adding some input, synthesizing the information, maybe doing a little calculation moving forward.

I have a pretty strong hypothesis, right, that this is an aggressive target.

We're going to have to do something pretty aggressive to reach that.

And my hypothesis would be based on the prompt, probably non premium.

They're kind of telling you in the first slide, right?

They're in a very niche market, maybe non premium new channels.

I buy my pet food on Amazon.

As I mentioned, I have 200 LB dogs.

I get that delivered every couple weeks.

There's lots of other places they could sell, possibly new geographies was one that was mentioned as well, or maybe acquisition to grow that fast in that time frame.

I think that would probably be my old hypothesis here.

So firms are not trying to trick you in the prompt, right?

Understand the Prompt

A lot of times they're giving you enough information that you can start to draw out some opinions or thoughts or insights in the introduction that will help you narrow that structure down.

A lot of times people just have very generic structures because they haven't synthesized the prompt.

So I always recommend people just practice synthesizing.

You know, pull up some prompts, read a line, give your take away, read a line, give your take away.

You've got to speed it up in a case, but it gets you practicing quick insights, quick synthesis, and that'll help drive a good structure.

And then in addition to having a good recap, you need good clarifying questions as well 'cause sometimes there will be some things that you're not clear on.

So once you do your recap, you can ask some questions, the types of questions that you want to ask here is anything that you missed or anything that's just definitionally you don't understand.

Define the Model

Also, defining the business model.

If the business model is not clear to you at the beginning, you're going to have a really bad structure as a result, right?

It needs to be specific to fit the case.

And then any kind of targets, time frames, so parameters more broadly, you know, what is it that we need to achieve to hit the target?

What is the target?

So those are the types of questions that you want to ask.

We'll look at an example of that here in a second.

What you don't want to do is start asking questions right away before you start recapping.

If you notice, like in my last recap, it took me a second, right?

I'm trying to digest the information.

If I just start asking questions, I probably haven't thought about it very well yet.

So recap first, then ask good clarifying questions.

Don't Ask for New Data Yet

Also, you don't want to be asking for new data or new information.

So if you ever find yourself saying you have more data on XYZ, you've probably overstepped a bit.

This should just be clarification.

All of the data that you're going to want is going to come as part of your structure.

So we'll really dive into that today, but you don't want to be asking for new data.

And then also, this is one that we hear a lot.

Are there any other objectives the client wants to solve today on an actual project?

You would never do that, right?

You're never trying to expand scope.

If you ask the CEO that they're going to say yes, I have 50 things I'd like for you to solve while you're here.

So you want to narrow it down and be more specific, confirm the parameter.

Do we have a specific profit target?

We need to reach an X time frame, not what else would you like for us to solve?

So you want to narrow things down and get really specific.

So let's take a look at an example of that.

Prompt 2

So here we've got another prompt, so same thing.

We'll let you read through it for a minute and then type in to chat.

You don't have to type in a list of questions.

Just pick maybe your top question or one question that you'd have based on the prompt, and then I'll tell you when to hit enter.

All right.

So everybody should, everybody should probably be typing something in here in terms of the key question they have and go ahead and hit enter when you have that typed in.

We'll take a look at a couple of these.

We got one which is any specific reason why the market is declining. That might be a little bit of additional information there.

That one you could ask, seems like it's dropping 2% a year, looks like demand is just dropping, right.

Might be a little bit of additional information with that question.

Let's get a few more in there.

Yep.

So we got a question around brick and mortar versus online presence.

OK, that's a good one.

It's kind of looking at their business model more specifically, so understand what's the scope of the business to that.

I would say that the client, they don't sell any directly to the consumer.

They do sell through retailers, various retailers, so nothing online.

Define the Market

Which market?

Yep, U.S. market.

So kind of putting some parameters around the business model here.

The sales model looks like wholesale retail, OK, those are similar.

Yep.

So I'm seeing quite a few business model questions, right, let's see customers.

OK.

So we got a mix.

So a lot of the questions I'm seeing kind of relate to the business model, right?

They told us a decent amount about the business, but yeah, what's the scope of business?

So geography US how they're selling, do they also distribute, right.

So those are types of business model questions you can ask.

There's two other ones.

So if we kind of go back to the checklist on the left, we can also look at any kind of definitional questions.

So reading through the prompt, I think everything's pretty clear.

The one question I would have, it says, and the client's brand has been declining at the same rate.

More Definition

When this is the client's brand, what do they mean by that?

And I'd say that their sales have been dropping at the same rate.

But that wasn't very clear to me.

So I'd say that's just kind of a definitional question.

I'm trying to understand what that means.

The business model, most of you guys hit most of those points.

And then, the one key thing I'd want to know is the parameters.

So do they have a specific revenue or profit target that they'd like for us to reach as they think about revamping this whiskey line, Right.

And in this case, I would say yes.

The minimum goal is they want to get back to where they were last year, so recouping that 15% drop.

So as you go through this case, right, you want to make sure you're targeting that specifically.

It'll help you determine if you've actually solved it or not.

All right, so we'll take a quick pause here.

Like I said, the core to getting a good structure down is really having a good intro, a good opening, which would consist of a good recap and good clarifying questions.

Structuring the Case Example

So now that we've got the opening figured out, now let's talk about the actual structure of the case.

So let's discuss kind of at a high level, what is the purpose of structure?

You know, how do you set this up at the beginning?

So again, first impression, right?

So the recap is kind of your ultimate first impression, but the structure is your major, first major component in a case.

Most interviewers will tell you they have a pretty good idea if they're going to give you an offer or not or give you a pass after your structure.

You've got to work really hard to convince them of either way, right?

So you want to make sure you have a really strong structure at the beginning.

What is structure from a real world perspective?

I think a lot of times people get focused on this idea of frameworks and it feels very unnatural to do this in a case in real life.

It's a work plan, right?

15:09

So at the beginning of a project, say Aunt McKinsey, you know you're gonna start off with a team of folks somewhere between 2 and 5 people.

And it's not two or five people just working on random things, right?

Someone is taking the time to really plan out what are the work streams for that project, right?

So each of your buckets within a structure correlates to a work stream.

Look at Workstreams

So what they're asking at the beginning of the case is basically saying, look, if you're a project manager, you're being tasked to solve this problem, what would be the work streams you would have created for your team?

How would you have delegated out the work?

It's not some weird, you know, framework thing that you're supposed to memorize or create.

It's a very practical component of a real world project.

In terms of frameworks, I get this question asked quite a bit.

Frameworks: Use or No?

Do you use frameworks or do not use frameworks?

Right.

There is a debate around this and I'd say the answer lies in the middle.

In real life, you know you have hours to develop a structure and develop a game plan for a project.

This is not an exercise that we do in 2 minutes in the real world, right?

So in real life we don't use a lot of these core frameworks day-to-day.

We will develop something very custom for that particular problem.

The challenge in a case is you have less than two minutes to come up with a game plan and fill that thing out.

And it needs to be structured and we'll talk about this next, but it needs to be me.

See, doing that in under 2 minutes is just not that realistic without a lot of practice and without using some type of framework to guide you along the process.

So ultimately, you do want to use frameworks, you want to leverage them, but you don't want to be regurgitating frameworks.

So that's what we're going to focus on a lot today is discussing how to customize the framework to fit so that you have a baseline, but you're not sounding like you're memorizing from a textbook.

And then in terms of what that actually looks like from a structuring standpoint, how do we structure the structure, right?

Customizing Frameworks

So typically speaking, you're going to have around 4 buckets.

As I mentioned on a classic strategy project, you might have a team of two, you might have a team of five.

There's somewhere in between there.

So two to five buckets, I would say is kind of the, the parameters to follow best practice 3 or 4.

So you're going to have 4 distinct buckets.

And then within those buckets, you want to include the data and analysis that that work stream would entail, right?

So you're saying personal one, you're tackling this issue.

Here's what I want you to do for this project.

Here's the data I want you to pull.

Here's the analysis I want you to conduct in order to solve that piece of the problem.

This concept of MECE, mutually exclusive.

You do not want to have two people working on the same thing.

That's not productive, right?

You could create a work stream and put two people on that work stream.

That's fine.

But if you have two people independently delegating that workout to two folks on the team, you're gonna end up duplicating effort.

So that's where that mutually exclusive aspect comes from, collectively exhaustive.

It's a problem if you forget a piece of the project, right?

That needs to be addressed.

So I see, it just comes down to a work plan, right?

And making sure that it's organized effectively.

So I've got a few questions for you.

Go ahead and type these into chat.

You can kind of separate these out with commas.

Allotted Time For Structuring

So duration to create.

So how long should it take you to create your structure, your pause, your duration to present the structure, the number of categories that your structure should have, how many buckets, the number of levels for that question that they asked?

And then how would you end that?

So go ahead and just delineate those by commas and type those in a chat and we'll talk about those.

You guys can go ahead and hit enter whenever you have those typed in.

All right.

I think a lot of people have some good answers here.

Yep, most of these look pretty correct directionally.

Those look great.

Awesome.

So in terms of time to develop the structure, you're going to go silent somewhere between 1:00 and 2:00 minutes, right?

You don't want to go less than a minute for sure.

If you've done that, you've probably not given it enough thought.

You don't want to go over 2 minutes.

So somewhere that you know, I saw 90 seconds in the chat, 90 seconds, 2 minutes, somewhere in that range is pretty good, About two minutes to present your structure.

Some firms can vary this a little bit.

So for example, McKinsey appreciates a fuller structure.

You could go up to three minutes.

Firms like Bain, I'd keep it to two.

So it can vary a little bit, but two minutes is good, a good ballpark to stick with categories, 4 categories that we talked about is generally a good, a good starting point.

We'll talk about this today.

For advanced structuring, you don't always have to have 4.

So you don't want to force fit that if it doesn't make sense for that case.

Again, this lines up with staffing.

So somewhere between 2:00 and 5:00 would be your, your bookends in terms of levels, 2 levels, right?

Levels in Structure

So we're saying that the first level is the name of the bucket, the concept.

The second level would be all the data points, the analysis that you would want that person to do within that work stream.

A more advanced structure could have more, something more like an issue tree.

You know, you could have 3 layers.

Now again, you only have two minutes.

So being able to do that realistically is quite challenging.

Usually in a case we'll talk about that, for example, McKinsey does oftentimes say they appreciate a third level.

We'll talk about how you can talk through that, but generally speaking, we'll say stick to two and then end with a hypothesis as well.

Identifying Which Structure

In terms of the frameworks, so we're, as I mentioned earlier, we're really going to dive deep into this market study framework and I'm going to kind of tag mergers and acquisitions onto that because it does leverage a similar approach.

So we're going to leave off market sizing for today and profitability.

Market sizing is kind of a different animal in itself.

Profitability, they are more straightforward.

Usually people can draw a profit tree.

So we're going to dive into the tougher ones today for this advanced framework session and really dive into these two more specifically.

Market Study Framework

So let's dive into the market study framework.

So this one, most people will probably have seen this somewhere before every, every resource out there on case prep teaches something pretty close to this.

You may see a variation in the buckets.

Sometimes you'll see competitors written as a separate one.

I like to group it with the market, but basically you've got the market, company, product and customer, all right.

And I, I don't have to read through all of these.

You guys can see what's in these buckets, but it's a very common structure that you'll see for a new market, a new product.

Any type of question that's more strategy focused is usually going to leverage some version of this framework.

Now, the problem with this structure is interviewers.

We aren't so keen on this framework.

So if you walk into an interview and you say there's four things I'm going to look at the market, the company that produces the customers, right?

The interviewer is just like, yeah, they read the case books, right?

So you can leverage it.

But what we want to talk about is how do you really customize this to fit a number of different types of questions really effectively.

So let's take a look at an example of customization of this.

Diving Into Customizations

So I've got a pretty simplistic prompt up here.

There's it's not as interesting or as detailed as the others that we'll that we looked at earlier.

We will address those here soon.

But let's start off with something pretty generic, right?

So our client is a car manufacturer.

They're interested in launching and designing a new sports car and they want to know what factors we'd want to consider to evaluate whether or not they should launch and how to go about this if they should, right?

So classic new market, new product.

That's about as straightforward a strategy case as you can get.

So taking that into consideration.

So go ahead and type in the chat.

Don't hit enter just yet, but what would be your, let's stick with about four buckets?

What would be the four buckets that you would have for this case?

And we'll pop it up here on the screen in a bit, but just want to get some input from everybody on the call and type those in and go ahead and hit enter whenever you have those typed in.

All right.

We've got a mix, we'll just read off a couple of these.

So we've got market competition, profitability and risks.

We got the car market, manufacturing capabilities, financials, how to launch, All right.

So they're kind of similar market product to customer companies.

So it sounds like our buckets kind of reordered in a different way though competitors, market size, financial feasibility, customers, all right, you'll, you'll notice everybody has a lot of very similar wording and terminology, right?

Some of them are pretty specific to this case.

I see sports car market attractiveness and then some kind of sound like the generic buckets, right.

So let's pull up an example of how we could structure this that is tailored to fit the case, right?

So I'm leveraging the market, company, product, and customer.

Don't Regurgitate a Framework

So I do have that framework kind of in black there, but I have those crossed out.

So like we said, we don't want to say those terms directly, right?

You don't want to walk in and say, I'm gonna look at 4 things and sound like you're regurgitating the framework, but we can leverage it, right?

So all I'm doing in the white here in the headings is relabeling these with purpose.

And I'm going to present them in a way that is more custom as well.

So how I'd actually present this just the high level buckets would be I'd say, you know, number.

There's a few things that we'll look at specifically.

First, I'd like to determine whether or not the sports car market is really an attractive market that the client should pursue to begin with.

Second, I want to evaluate it.

This car manufacturer has the capabilities to execute.

It could be a great opportunity in the market.

That doesn't mean we can capitalize on it.

Third, I'm skipping to that last bucket.

I'd like to evaluate the go to market strategy in terms of who we're targeting, how do we reach them effectively.

And then lastly, I would want to run the finances for this particular sports car, make sure it's profitable for the client.

I am directly using the framework.

It doesn't sound like I'm using the framework though, right?

It's tailored to fit and so you don't have to come up with new buckets.

Present Buckets Customized

You just need to make sure that you're presenting your buckets in a way that it sounds like you understand what you mean by them, that you're not just saying I want to look at the company, right?

That sounds like you want a picture of the company.

It's not meant with purpose, right?

And then you'll notice I also reordered these as well.

So I talked about the financials last, right?

Because in order of operations, I would probably do that last.

So I'm going to introduce my high level buckets, right?

And then you can go back and kind of fill in the details, right?

So I'm gonna do a quick run through of what that might sound like and then we'll talk about the customization aspects of it.

Let's Talk About the Sport Car Industry

So I'd say, OK, starting with the sports car market attractiveness, I'm gonna start with the help of the economy, right?

Sports cars, it's a luxury good.

It requires some discretionary income, size and growth of the market.

It's the end of different segments such as, you know, a high end Lamborghini versus a Ford Mustang or electric, non electric, 2 door, 4 door.

There's probably many subsets of sports cars.

We want to figure out which ones are most attractive moving forward as we think about entry.

Who are the key competitors, their market shares, what kind of vehicles are they launching over the next few years so we can compete effectively in the space?

And any regulatory factors to be concerned about?

I think Volkswagen's had a lot of issues with bigger engine sports cars with emissions.

Fuel economy might be something that we want to pay attention to for this particular project.

Moving on to the car manufacturer's capabilities, I wanna look at things like branding.

Does launching a sports car fit their current brand image or not?

Huge shift in rebranding for Cadillac, for example, over the last 15 years to sell the kind of vehicles they do now, financing is gonna be very costly, hundreds of millions of dollars of investment, potentially developing a new vehicle from scratch.

And then operationally, I wanna look at do we have the capacity, the expertise, the resources to actually do this across our value chain, right.

As we think about R&D, procurement, manufacturing, marketing, sales, distribution to dealerships, there's going to be a lot of operations that need to align to get this vehicle to the market.

And then moving on to the go to market strategy, let's figure out who we're targeting, who would be our target customer?

Think About Market Demographics + Financials

What are the demographics in terms of age, income, gender, etcetera.

How does that tie into their preferences with regards to what kind of features they want to look for in a vehicle, what price point they'd be willing to pay, how they want to market to them, know your customer right and, and meet their needs effectively.

And then lastly, taking all that into consideration, we want to run the financials for this vehicle.

Ultimately, I'm trying to get to an ROI or a payback period NPV, right?

So we need to figure out what would be the incremental profit, breaking down the revenues and the cost for this vehicle in particular.

So to get started, I'd probably begin with and you can pick a spot.

This one, this prompt doesn't really have much information to help you with a hypothesis, so probably just starting with the market would be fine.

So it's the core framework, but tailored to fit.

And it sounds more custom than it really is, right?

Your goal is to kind of trick your interviewer into thinking you've come up with a custom framework when it really is kind of the typical market study approach in terms of customization.

Key Approaches

There's a few things I'm going to highlight here.

Number one, like I said, never say market, company, product, customer, not directly, right?

Make sure you tailor it to fit.

So relabel those high level buckets.

The second thing is you can reorder your buckets, right?

So I mentioned this, I talked about the financials last.

I can't really run the financials if I don't have a go to market strategy to run the financials for.

So you're either going to put your buckets in order of operations, like an actual project, how you would do that or order of priority.

So reorder those buckets and then if you notice, I added a lot more color as I presented it.

So I purposely when I wrote up the slide, did not write the full words here.

In some cases, like when I wrote a CM cap, I know I meant car manufacturer capabilities.

I don't have time to write that, right?

So another question that I get is how much should I be writing?

Not a lot, right?

You've got less than two minutes.

You're definitely not going to be writing full sentences.

I don't even get full words down like I write MKT or Reg.

I know what I mean by that, and then I'll talk to it as I go.

Two Structure Versions

So I always tell people, when you're practicing structure, there's two versions of structure.

There's your written version, which is going to look pretty generic.

So if you look at someone else's structure that they've developed, it's always going to look generic, right?

Because they don't have that much time to write.

But your verbal version should be way more colorful, right?

So I wrote MKT, but I said, oh, I want to look at size and growth of the market and of different segments such as, right?

And I gave some examples.

I definitely am not going to write that in under 2 minutes.

So you'll notice the abbreviations here.

It's because it's how I'd actually write it.

So I'd probably have something pretty close to this on my paper in under 2 minutes.

But that verbal explanation will be much more colorful.

Reverse Engineer Your Prompt

One of the key things when presenting structures is that I always tell people, if I hear your structure, I should be able to reverse engineer your prompt.

What I mean by that is if you walk me through your structure and I have no clue what industry we're talking about, I have no clue what the prompt was about.

It's way too generic, right?

You want to make sure that it's really clear we're talking about launching a new sports car, right?

So as I talk through that structure, try to bring in some examples, car brands, examples of I'm like financing this is gonna be hundreds of millions of dollars, right?

It's a huge investment, right?

Or as we think about, you know, the regulatory factors, you know, such as a bigger engine, you're gonna have more issues with that.

So being specific in your wording is really key to making that structure come to life.

So add some color.

And then we did not do this here, but I want to talk about adding or removing buckets.

You do not have to use these 4.

Don't go crazy swapping out buckets.

It is a standard structure for a reason.

It works pretty well.

However, you can add or remove based on this idea of a work plan.

If you get a case and you think OK, this is a really big deal, you're welcome to make that a bucket by itself because you can make that a separate work stream.

You're saying I would put a person or team of people on that particular issue, or if you can't justify it as a work stream, remove it, right?

Regrouping Buckets

Or you could regroup it.

So a couple examples of that.

Let's say you're doing a banking case set in the year 2008.

Make the economy a bucket by itself.

It's a huge deal, right?

It's a huge issue.

You could carve that out so you can't talk about it in the market anymore, but you could make that a bucket by itself.

You can make competitors a bucket by itself.

I usually don't.

I usually group it with my market.

Bucket size growth and the breakdown of the market in terms of the competitive landscape seem to fit well to me.

However, if I hear in a prompt that the competitors are gaining market share or losing, there's a lot of new entrance in the space.

You can make that a bucket by itself.

And so ask yourself, does this thing merit or justify a work stream into itself?

If so, make it a bucket.

Make it a separate category.

The opposite of that would be removing buckets.

So you don't want to force something if it just doesn't fit.

So I like to give this example.

Let's say our clients are like a bottled water manufacturer.

They're thinking about launching a new private label water, bottled water.

I don't know how much you care about customers in that case.

I'm not saying it's relevant.

I just don't know if I'd put a whole team of people on looking at customers for water.

So it could be a scenario where you remove that as a bucket, maybe tuck it underneath your market bucket.

So you're saying, hey, market in that attractive work stream person that's tackling that while you're looking at the market, go ahead and take a quick look at customers.

But I don't want to justify that as a work stream in itself.

It's a bit of overkill, right?

So you can add or remove depending on what's more or less important in that case.

Internal vs External Factors

And then if you start doing that, you'll realize the market and customer are ultimately more external factors, whereas company and product tend to be more internal factors.

So at its core, really you just have external, internal.

That's why the structure works for everything pretty much.

It's super generic.

It does fit a lot of cases, but you cannot say external and internal for every single case you do, right.

It will just be the same framework over and over.

What you're doing though, with this framework is you're picking which external factors and which internal factors are the biggest deals that you want to make work streams out of.

Yeah.

So this external, internal lens you can use for many different case types, which is what, which is what we're going to spend the rest of our time looking at today, all the different variations of this particular framework.

And then you'll also notice that market and company kind of become your anchor buckets because products could fold under company, right?

You can blend that our customer can roll underneath the market, as I mentioned for the bottled water case, right?

So marketing companies kind of form your anchor buckets.

So rarely should you be removing one of those two.

You'd have to have a very good reason to do that 'cause if you remove market or company, you've kind of chopped off either all external or all internal factors, which would probably be an issue.

So not saying never, right, But you have to have a really good reason to do that based on the prompt.

But that is not an issue that we need to look at.

Look at Financials

One question I do get a lot is we have financing under the company bucket and then we have financials.

Is that not Mece, right?

Or is that Mece?

So I always tell folks, think about it as a work plan, you know, the company bucket.

I'm saying this person needs to go talk to the client, talk to the CFO, see what kind of budget we're working with, right?

Can we take on debt?

Do we have cash on hand?

This person's building a financial model for the sports car.

They're separate work.

It's a different type of work that's happening.

So it's not like the term does not show up anywhere else?

Let's think about it as a work plan.

Is it clear what one person is working on versus another?

That will help you determine whether or not something's me.

And then if there is something that you could justify in multiple buckets, that's fine.

There are a lot of gray areas where you could put certain things.

Just pick one.

As long as it's in one bucket and not in multiple.

And it's clear you're saying, hey, person one, you're going to address this, not person 2.

Perfectly fine, right?

There's plenty of gray areas.

As long as you pick one that makes sense, keep it just in that bucket.

Don't duplicate it.

It'll be fine.

There's one last question before we move on is that from Sabrina.

Do you think a product would be important such as how you want the price of it, features of the sports car is important to the needs of the consumer?

Yep.

So I included that within the customer when I did the structure.

So I said I want to understand what our customers want in terms of all those things.

So I put it as part of customer needs as opposed to product.

You can always have a product bucket, but in this case, let's say it's McKinsey, they're not going to design a sports car.

So I ended up removing that product feature bucket and addressing it more with customers and then just made this one the financials for the vehicle.

But you could do that.

All right, that's an option.

You could, you could definitely have a product bucket in addition to a customer bucket in this case, that'd be fine.

So there's a lot of subjective decisions you can make within a case.

Again, as long as it makes sense and fits as a work stream, that's fine.

You can definitely do that.

Variations

All right, so let's dive into some variations.

So another common type of case is growth.

There we go.

So this one we looked at the prompt.

So we already talked about the hypothesis for this one earlier.

So we talked about this as a great example of how to synthesize a prompt really well.

So I know that the structure popped it there for a second, but go ahead and type in, I don't know if everybody saw those.

Go ahead and type in what your buckets would be for this case.

So we're still leveraging this concept of market and company, but then how would you tweak it to fit a growth case?

So feel free to just hit enter, go ahead and type in the buckets within there.

Go ahead and hit Enter when you get those entered.

All right, I don't see any popping up just yet.

There we go.

Market, company, economy, great dog food market attractiveness, the competitors, customers, ways to grow, OK, awesome financial performance, dog food market, other opportunities and risks, OK Yep, I'm seeing kind of a mix of the buckets that I have here.

Premium dog food market.

All right, I like it specific, right, awesome.

So I think we've got all the ones I have on my list that have made it into chat somewhere.

So I'll give you my take on this one.

So this one's a classic growth case, right?

We're trying to grow sales, grow market share, and do something about top line improvement.

So as I mentioned, marketing companies usually don't want to get rid of those, all right, because if you remove one of those, you've chopped off either all your external or all your internal factors.

So I'm going to include those two.

Many people had.

I saw a lot of markets, I didn't see as many companies listed there.

And then it's a growth case.

I'm just going to tailor it and call it growth options.

So opportunities for growth, you know, how do we grow?

I saw a few of those in the chat as well.

So when I present this, I might say something along the lines of, OK, first, there's three main things I'm going to look at.

Look for These

First, I'm going to look for opportunities for growth in the market.

We're looking for a lot of growth.

So where is there opportunity for that?

Second, again, it's gonna be pretty difficult to grow this aggressively in that time frame.

So I really understand the capabilities of the client.

And then those two things will help me and assess which growth options actually make sense in this case.

So starting with the opportunities for growth in the market, let's look at size and growth of the market.

Getting more specific now for premium versus non, right?

I'm assuming that the non-premium market might have a pretty substantial size and growth in the market by channel, right?

I'm assuming there's probably some other channels out there like grocery stores or online e-commerce etcetera.

And then size and growth even for other types of pet products, I like dogs, dog leashes, cat food, bird food.

There's probably a lot of other markets we could look at again because we're looking for a lot of growth opportunities here.

And then who are the major competitors or market shares and trying to understand if there's a gap in the market for us to play effectively, then looking at the capabilities, financing is going to be expensive, right, to grow that fast and that time frame.

So do they have a budget for that cash on hand etcetera?

Do they have capacity, spare capacity to make that much more dog food or whatever else they decide to manufacture?

It could take a couple years just to build up those capabilities.

So we need to understand that or if we need to think about outsourcing etcetera.

And then also looking at general branding, marketing, making sure that they have good capabilities to leverage moving forward.

And then also you could say, do they have a history of success or failures in different areas?

Like what are they just generally good at doing from a growth standpoint?

And then those two, like I said, will help me understand which growth options might make sense.

Inorganic versus Organic Growth

And you could split this inorganic versus organic growth.

And I'd say given the aggressive nature of the target, as I mentioned earlier on, we probably want to think about inorganic growth like an acquisition so we can explore that organic growth.

I'd say given the prompt, probably new products or new channels would be areas that I'd probably prioritize moving forward.

We could look at things like pricing, marketing, customer segmentation, but those things and in themselves probably not going to help us grow that fast in that time frame.

So to get started, I'd probably look at size and growth for I'd probably do premium, non premium or by channel, right, based on the prompt.

So this one, we talked about this one earlier in terms of being very hypothesis driven.

Like I have an opinion on the Prof, right?

Aggressive growth, right?

And they're in a niche market.

They're probably gonna have to look at acquisitions, new products, new channels, aggressive growth.

And then I'm letting that hypothesis feed into the specifics of the structure.

So I'm not just saying like, oh, let's look at size and growth of the market, but size and growth for premium versus non.

And I'm assuming that the non-premium market is pretty substantial.

All right.

Refining the Structure

So as you synthesize those prompts, it'll help you refine that structure to be much more specific to fit the case, but same framework market company.

And then we're tailoring to fit a growth case and growth options that's leveraging the same general high level approach.

We're going to breeze through some of these other ones real quick.

So there's a bunch of other variations of this.

So this one we looked at for clarifying questions.

So it's the whiskey case, right?

So this one is an issue of revenue decline, right.

So we said they've lost 15% market share last year relative to a market drop of 2%.

So they are losing market share, their revenues are probably declining, right?

So they're, they're definitely having some issues here.

You can use the same structure, market, company, product, customer instead of the market as a whole, though.

Let's make this just about the competitors.

We know what the market's doing.

They said it's dropping 2% a year.

All right, so we don't need to have a whole bucket for the market.

So it's a good example if you just have a market bucket and you talk about size and growth.

I'm like, I, I don't know if you listen to the prompt, right?

Dig Into Competitors

So tailoring that more specifically, let's just dig into the competitors.

We know they stole market share.

We lost last year.

So who stole the share and why, right?

And whoever gained share, let's look at what they're doing from a company perspective.

It's that they've been paying limited attention to their whiskey line, right?

They've been growing the rest of their business.

So I'm guessing they may have neglected something internally, right?

So like funding for whiskey marketing, supply chain manufacturing, how they're managing their accounts with retailers, right?

Let's see if they've just neglected it in some way that caused an issue here.

I did keep the product bucket.

So digging into the whiskey changes the flavor, pricing, packaging.

Do they have recalls, right, something that was an issue with the product itself?

And then any changes to customer preferences, you know, who are the target customers?

What have been some of the trends, Any changing preferences to be aware of?

So it's the same structure, just tailored to fit a revenue decline case.

It's the reason for the revenue drop, but again, tailoring it to fit the prompt.

Yeah.

So not looking at the market as a whole, for example, but looking at competitors more closely.

M&A

Another example would be M&A.

So this one we do have as a separate case type in itself, but it does actually leverage a similar framework.

So let's take a look at this one.

Our client is APE Firm.

They're considering the acquisition of a company called Big Yellow Bus.

It's one of the leading manufacturers of school buses in the US.

They're the number one player in the market in terms of revenue #2 in terms of volume of buses sold.

So if you were reading this prompt and synthesizing, and I'm like, wait, they're one in revenue, 2IN volume.

That means they have highly priced buses, right?

There's only three comparisons in the market.

They have relatively equal market share, but Big Yellow Bus was the clear leader five years ago.

So you can confirm they are one of the three.

So Big Yellow Bus is one of three players.

It's telling us clearly they've lost market share.

I don't know how much, you know, we might want to explore that.

What would we want to consider to determine whether or not the PE firm should acquire?

So if they've lost significant market share, it seems like we've got some issues with the yellow bus, right?

There's some red flags here.

The question is can they turn them around and get a good return, right?

So we're going to leverage the same structure.

We got a market company, same thing.

And then I'm going to tailor it to fit in M&A.

Think Like PE Firm

So like post acquisition strategy, I'd like to do a bucket for the deal.

It's like the investment banking factors to consider.

So we can look at the school bus market attractiveness and I'm like who stole share and why, right is the big question that I have.

But yeah, we can look at size growth trends, regulatory factors, etcetera, due diligence on big yellow buses, right?

Is this a good company to acquire their financials?

I'm really concerned about this highly priced bus issue that they have going on.

So pricing is a big question that I would have in this case.

And then is that due to port cost structure, like why do they have highly priced buses or is it due to bigger buses that are quality etcetera?

I think they're in some other typical stuff, right?

But focusing again on the key items that you're hearing out of the prompt that are issues that you need to look into, right?

Then the post acquisition strategy, what's the PE firm good at?

Can they help them improve their situation either on the revenue or the cost side?

And then you know, we can look at the valuation in terms of the deal.

This is a business that's on the decline.

I can't overpay for it.

So I have some concerns.

Look at Exit Options

Also exit options, there's only three players in the market.

So who are we going to sell to as an APE firm at the end?

So it's the classic stuff from an M&A perspective, but again, tailoring it to fit that prompt.

If you synthesize those prompts and pull out a couple insights from the prompt, you can leverage that as part of your structure.

The answer to this case, by the way, is yes, they have poor cost structure and they can't fix it.

So it's a bad acquisition.

You could kind of see it coming in the prompt, right?

I usually tell folks, you know, if you have an opinion at the beginning of the case of where you think the case is headed, see if you can consistently guess the end of the case, right?

In most cases you can kind of foresee where it's going and it'll help you drive that case really well.

Again, they're not trying to trick you.

They're giving you little Nuggets of information to help you drive that case.

Well.

Another one is pricing.

Look at Pricing

We'll just, we've got two more to wrap up real quick.

So pricing this one.

Our client is a medical devices company.

They developed a new cardiovascular stent.

It's a little kind of advice.

It goes in the RA, the heart to help improve blood flow.

They want to determine how to price it.

You can use the same framework.

So the competitive, the market view of pricing is what the comparators charge the company's view, they probably want to make money.

So cost plus margin or cost based pricing, what's the product worth, what are the value and benefits of that product and what are customers willing to pay, right?

You're not going to say market, company, product, customer.

It's just an, it's just a background framework for you to get going through the case to make sure you're not missing items and then it's staying messy so you can play with the structure quite a bit.

One More Example

Last one, this one is about diagnosing the education system, let's say K through 12 in a European country.

So we want to look at how you would diagnose the education system, market, company, product, customer, and other external factors like the economy, culture, government spending, the school and everything within a school instead of the company.

Are you the product in this case would be the curriculum or the programs customers or the students, right.

So enrollments, test scores, etcetera.

You can do a lot with this framework as an interviewer.

Hey, this framework, everybody sounds like a robot coming through as a coach.

I love this framework.

I'm like, it works for everything.

You just got to get a little creative and how you relabel those buckets and use it across a variety of cases.

In terms of a practice plan, real quick, there's the academic frameworks.

Resources to Help

Those are good to look at to understand the basics.

If you're one of our clients that has a black belt package with us, we've got the videos where it goes for the case interview boot camp.

It teaches you the frameworks via video.

Also the books, the consulting Interview Bible.

And then I highly recommend Step 2, which is where you want to look at full cases.

You pick a few of each category and you go through that process that we just did.

The opening, you structure it, you look at the sample structure, but read through that case.

So you read through the full case start to finish, see if your structure is aligning to where the case goes right?

Does my structure anticipate the data and analysis coming later in the case?

And then lastly, the video drills on our website.

If you're one of our black belt clients, we have a ton of drills to help you with speed as well.

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