Many people wonder how they can go above and beyond in an interview to stick in an interviewer’s mind. Knowing how to do a case interview merely puts you on the same level as everyone else. However, enhancing your communication through the use of diagrams and charts can put you over the top. Most interviewers’ eyes will immediately light up when they see you use the charts discussed below because this is the way consultants think and even how they communicate points to clients!

Market Share Pie Chart (Gaining Share vs. Growing The Pie)

This is probably the simplest, and most commonly applicable chart, but rarely anyone uses it! It’s low hanging fruit you can take advantage of. It’s great for demonstrating the various strategies available for:

• Increasing sales (steal share or grow the total market?)
• New product launch strategy (take a small slice of a big pie or a big slice of a small pie?)
• Pretty much anything involving changing the levers on the percentage of the market you own or influencing the size of the total market.

The chart is super easy to draw. The hardest part is recognizing the opportunity to use it. (more…)

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Note: By frameworks we mean memorized ways of addressing specific business scenarios.

Many casebooks will often include a ton of frameworks to memorize for the case interview, whether it’s “Top 12 Business Scenarios,” the 7 Q’s, the 5 D’s, etc. I think that these frameworks might be useful to read (especially if you have no business experience whatsoever), but at the end of the day, trying to do crack the case by memorizing a set of frameworks is wrong for several reasons:

1)     It may misguide you

When you memorize a lot of frameworks, it is easy to become myopic and even overconfident. (more…)

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A lot of people get stuck when it comes to the case because they have no idea what questions to ask in order to gather data and crack the case. Once you’ve set up your structure, you move onto “data gathering and analysis”. But what exactly does “analysis” mean? If you have a well-formed structure, the ambiguous problem should be segmented into pretty clean buckets such as customers and competitors, but then what? What questions should you ask about customers? Here’s how you should go about thinking about it:

Analysis = Breaking the problem apart to identify the specific source of the problem

For example, when you think about customers, you should not just ask about the total number of customers and the revenue they generate. That only keeps your thinking on the surface level. (more…)

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