Draft written by Claude from your background — replace with your own view before publishing.
Almost every candidate I work with arrives with the same three frameworks memorised and the same problem: they apply them to cases where they do not fit, and the interviewer watches a profitability tree get forced onto a market entry question.
What is actually being graded
An interviewer is answering one question: put in front of a client, will this person make the thinking clearer or muddier? Everything in the case is a proxy for that.
Structure is the visible part. Not the framework you name, but whether your breakdown is genuinely exhaustive, whether the branches are separable, and whether you can say why each branch matters before going down it. A candidate who invents a three-part structure specific to the problem beats one reciting a five-part standard structure, every time.
Narrate the decision, not just the conclusion
The most common fixable error is silence. Candidates think, then announce an answer. The interviewer sees the answer and no reasoning, so cannot give credit for reasoning that was never made audible.
Say which branch you are taking first and what would make you abandon it. Two sentences. This also protects you: an interviewer who can hear your logic will redirect you before you waste four minutes.
The maths is a composure test
The arithmetic in a case is deliberately simple. What is being tested is whether you stay legible under pressure — stating assumptions aloud, rounding sensibly, sanity-checking against something you know. A candidate who gets a number slightly wrong and immediately says “that seems too large, let me check the denominator” scores better than one who produces a precise figure they cannot defend.
Practise fewer cases, more slowly
After each case, write down the structure you used and a better one you could have used. Most candidates run thirty cases and get better at running cases without getting better at the thing cases measure. Ten with a real post-mortem each will move you further.
If you are working through this yourself,book a 30-minute call.