Hi, I'm Jenny Rae, the Managing Director of Management Consulted.
I'm here with all-star Lisa Bright. Hi Lisa! Hello. Excited to walk through with you an
example of a case interview structure. And we thought it would be fun to put
this together just so that people could kind of see something that Management
Consulted really brings to the table distinctively which is that we have four
clear basic structures, but we don't necessarily recommend adhering to these
magical structures. We use them as a baseline and then ask people to go
beyond that. So I'm gonna give you a prompt and then the prompt can actually
go in a lot of different directions - you could use more than one of the basic
structures with it, but I'm interested in just having you kind of lay out for us
what you're gonna do. People will be able to see what you actually have going on
on the paper at the same time, which might be really fun. And then I'll have
you take the time to review the prompt, go through the structure read it back to
me, and we'll discuss it a little bit. Does that sound good? Let me read my writing. We'll see. Yeah exactly.
Well you can draw largely in this
situation because we actually have quite a bit of space and time, and we're only
doing the structure so we don't have to go beyond it. Okay on a separate page then. Okay fantastic.
So let me just give you the background of the case. Our client is a U.S. car manufacturer.
They have seen lagging performance in the last couple of years. They're
battling to both sell cars and also to manufacturer profitably. Our client is
interested in a way to revive their business by doing something innovative.
One of the ideas that they've looked at is to launch a sports car - they have none
currently in their line. And they're interested in understanding what kinds
of things they would need to think about in order to do this successfully.
Ultimately they'd like a recommendation of whether or not they should pursue the
sports car idea. Do you have any questions about the background?
All right so let me just recap this really quick. So it sounds like we have a
U.S. car manufacturer. You said they've been lagging performance. I had a
question mark there, but I think you said they they're lagging in terms of selling
cars, so lagging on the sales side? Yep. And then also in manufacturing profitably?
That's right. Okay so they're having both top line and bottom line issues. It seems to
be that way unfortunately. They want to look at reviving through innovation. Yup.
Specifically a sports car they don't currently have any and they're thinking
about launching this new line of vehicle, and they want to know what they should
think about in terms of making that decision. Do they want to think about how
they'd go about it too, or just kind of like determining whether or not it's a
good idea, or kind of a mix of the two? Yeah they are interested in
basically ultimately the final recommendation which is yes or no, so I
think putting some practical steps to it could be important for that. Okay great
so I think I have a pretty clear idea of the prompt - the only other thing I would
ask is do they have any certain targets in mind? So that seems like I said
they're having top line and bottom line issues - do they have targets in mind that
they would like for us to achieve? It's just really important that it doesn't
just help them move more units and then in some way eliminate profitability.
Right. So they have to really keep both of those in tandem in mind. Okay.
I think have a pretty clear idea of the prompt, if you don't mind I'll
just take a moment to gather my thoughts. Yes. Take your time.
Okay I think I've got a plan of how I want to approach this. Okay so since our client is
a car manufacturer, they're interested in launching and designing a sports car and
they want to know if that's a good idea. And if so, how they go about it both from
increasing top line revenue as well as keeping in mind that they want to be
more profitable as well. I think there are four key areas that I like to look
into or four key questions that we need to ask to determine if that's a good idea.
Okay. So first of all, I'd want to look at the overall
market attractiveness for sports cars to really determine if that is an
attractive market our client should want to pursue or not. If that's the case, then
I want to better understand this car manufacturers capabilities. It might be a
great opportunity - that doesn't mean they can actually capture that, so we want to
look more closely at that. And then third, I'd want to more closely understand the
profitability of the sports car, because since they're considering the the bottom
line as well. And then if all that looks good, I want to think about a go-to
market strategy for our client, and how we provide some next steps in terms of
how they'd go about it. So to start off with the market attractiveness,
I do want to look at the broader economy, I'm thinking sports cars
require some discretionary income - it's kind of a luxury good - so I want to make
sure that watching this is a good economy moving forward. Overall size and
growth of the market and in terms of what kind of revenues we think we could
generate, what the key trends are? Who are the main competitors?
What kind of sports cars do they have planned for future launches - so we can
think about how we position ourselves and what that's gonna look like moving
forward. And then also regulatory issues. I know Volkswagen recently had some
issues with their sports cars with fuel economy and emissions standards and
things like that, so I think this is a bit different from a typical vehicle.
We might want to consider things like that. Okay, in terms of our capabilities - so
I want to look at branding, you know for example Cadillac - huge shift in
rebranding over the last few years to sell the types of cars that they do. Yep.
Financing ability - hundreds of millions of dollars go into designing new
vehicles - can we afford it? Then basically, their entire value chain all the way
from R&D, through sourcing, all the way through to the end of distribution - so
that full process, I think that this type of product launch is going to affect
everything. So do they have the capabilities, the resources, capacity, etc.
And then also, if we can't do that, do we need to explore like M&A type activity
or something like that to execute? I think we really want to focus on the
profitability of the sports car, that's one of their big concerns. So ultimately
I'm looking for like a break-even or return on investment that we could
calculate. Okay so we need to look at both the revenues and the costs, what
kind of price points we think we could get, based on the market attractiveness,
some data that we get there could inform how many units we think we can push, and
then also our capabilities can help inform what our cost structure would look like.
Okay. And then overall, looking at the go-to-market strategy, I
want to understand who we're targeting, what kind of segments are we going after
in there demographics, and I think that can help inform how we market and how we
distribute our products. So for example are we gonna go with like high-end
dealerships or something like that compared to what we do today? So I think
that's broadly how I'd like to attack this, and I think the big first question
would be is this market attractive? So I'd like to dive into understanding more
about kind of size and growth of the market. Fantastic, all right, relax!
All right, all right. So that was amazing, really good, I just want to point out a
couple of things that you did across the board and then maybe tweaking things if
somebody's thinking, wow that was really good, but they still want to take it to
the next level. So overall you did a great job on
the recap, you I thought did an amazing job of synthesizing. You went through in
a linear fashion but you really tied everything together, so it didn't feel
like a complete repeat of what I had talked about, and you did some
interpretation as you were going which is great. And then your clarifying
questions were spot-on. You really only asked two of them - one of
them was just around the how which was kind of a very like loose and
tangible question but helped inform your structure that you ended up choosing,
because that whole fourth bucket actually was really informed by that, and
then the second one was around whether you were, how you we were going to
define success, which also defined one of your buckets, the profitability bucket.
And so I really liked that your questions were clear, they didn't ask me
for new data, but they were clearly informed what your structure was going
to be, and so I think you picked good questions related to that. I liked the
fact that your structure was four buckets. I also really liked the fact
that these buckets were some of the typical buckets but you called them
something a little different. And so this felt like a creative structure to me, but
it felt creative, however, not disorganized because you had four clear
buckets and then each of your buckets, I could even see on your paper are very
clearly delineated. So I liked the combination of creativity and clarity here.
I thought you did a great job of balancing those. And then inside the
buckets, I thought that they were really good, you know, this kind of case
lends itself to the question mark of the MECE structure, and I thought you did a
great job of demonstrating that whether it is mutually exclusive is pretty
important, and so you didn't really have anything here that you would look at
twice, but collectively exhaustive is a little harder to do, however what you did
was you tied some of the pieces together, which made it feel like it was more
integrated and complete. So across the board I think that that was
also really strong. Then you had in market attractiveness and capabilities,
not just a sense of the buckets, but also a sense of their priority. And so one of
my favorite things was that at the end when you came back and you said where you
wanted to start, it was bucket number one. I see that a lot, you probably do too,
where people lay things out and then they say bucket number three seems
like a great place to start and you think, what in the world. You know, and
what yours happened to actually be the first one that you would come up with,
and the first one on your page, but as you know it doesn't have to be that way.
You can always relabel them or renumber them. Exactly. So I just thought overall
the overarching structure was good and the
prioritization was really good. Inside the actual information you explained
very clearly and I think an appropriate segmentation so you spent an approximate
equal amount of time on each one of those key buckets. So that was great
because it wasn't like oh this is the really important one and then here's ten
seconds on the other ones. And it depends on the prompt too, if it emphasized one piece or another I
probably would've dove into more detail in one of those but it seemed pretty
open-ended. There was very little direction as to where the focus should be.
And even in that situation you might have broken up that big question into smaller
questions and kind of ended up in the same place, so I felt like the only thing
that was I wanted to point out something that you did really well and then
something that I think could be just a next-level option. So when you were
talking about the different things, there were a couple of places - in every bucket
you had something that was metric oriented - so you had size and growth of
the market for market attractiveness, capabilities you had the M&A question,
and you had the the cost across the value chain for profitability, you had
the break even and ROE, the number that you were looking for, and then for the go-to
market, you had the segments in the demographics. The only thing that I would
recommend, and just something that I found to some really helpful for people,
to be clear regardless of the case type you're doing. Right this is a pretty
general one, you could get this at McKinsey - it's a little less likely
McKinsey's would probably be a little bit more data rich even in the beginning.
This is probably more of a BCG style case, and so in that situation if you're
going to have to be in the driver seat in order to get the data. I just usually
recommend that they put that number first. So the first thing that you gather
is the data and the information and then everything else is kind of context that
surrounds it. So that was really out of everything just one recommendation that
I had to kind of make it a little bit more clear. And one thing I wanted to
point out too is my four buckets actually really align to one of the
frameworks. So you've got market attractiveness,
meaning you're kind of your market competition type category. Yes.
Your car manufacturer being the company bucket. Yep. And then you've
got profitability of the sports car - I kind of tweaked the product bucket a
little bit. Yeah that's great. And let's focus on profits of that. Ultimately though
products would really make sense for that and when people talk about features
and the product without driving the profitability, it doesn't end up making sense
So yes I could have added more of that but I was like, I think let's
just keep it profit for this one but we could have done a
little bit more there, and then go to market strategy kind of being the
customer focus. Yeah. so it does kind of align to one of the key strategy frameworks.
Absolutely. But it just is tweaked in terms of wording so
it seems more creative. And also in terms of order. Sometimes you would see company,
or sorry, market first, then you would see customer or market
competition and then customer, and then company in products - so the fact that you
switched it around I thought was amazing. Awesome. Great job. Thanks.