Hi everyone,
I’m currently struggling with structuring in case interviews, especially for questions like:
“Should we enter this market?”
A typical structure that seems logical to me is:
- Is the market attractive? (customers, demand, willingness to pay, growth, competitors)
- Do we have the capabilities/resources to compete?
- Is the opportunity financially viable / profitable?
However, I keep running into a conceptual issue with this structure.
When analyzing market attractiveness, I look at factors such as market size, growth, customer demand, and pricing dynamics to understand how attractive the market is overall. But at the same time, these exact outputs essentially determine the revenue potential of the business.
In other words:
The conclusions from the market analysis (e.g. how big the market is, how strong demand is, what price levels are realistic) directly shape the revenues that I later use in the financial analysis.
This is where I get stuck:
If the revenue potential is fundamentally derived from the market attractiveness, doesn’t that mean that the financials bucket is not really independent?
It feels like:
- The market bucket already defines the “ceiling” of what is possible,
- And the financials bucket is just a transformation of that into revenues and profit.
So my questions are:
- How can this still be considered MECE if one bucket essentially determines the outcome of another?
- Is MECE in case interviews about separating types of questions (e.g. attractiveness vs. profitability), rather than ensuring independence of results?
- Or is there a better way to structure such cases to avoid this dependency?
I feel like I’m missing a fundamental principle here, because this issue comes up repeatedly across different case types.
Would really appreciate any guidance.
