Best Practices for Interview with McKinsey Digital

Hi,
it will be important to show expertise in Digital trends and Digital transformation of large companies, but you will be also assessed with classical business cases of generalists.

Best,
Antonello

Hi Anonymous,

I recently helped a candidate for an experienced hire digital role in MBB. You can expect:

• Questions related to your knowledge/problem solving in digital projects. This will likely be part of the fit questions at the beginning
• Business cases related to digital
• Business cases related to other sectors

I would recommend to prepare in the standard way for PEI and cases, trying to (i) have good stories related to your experience in digital and (ii) cover cases related to the digital sector in your preparation. 

As usual, for EM roles you should expect more questions related to leadership and client interaction compared to a new graduate application.

In case you need more information please feel free to PM me.

Best,
Francesco

Hi,

There will be a mix of regular and IT cases. For the regular cases on preplounge will be most helpful. For the IT cases, I recommend reading the articles of the consulting companies about these topics on their websites (Hundreds of them if you google by key words "agile", "Digital", at McKinsey, BCG or Accenture)

Feel free to reach out if you need help with digital case prep.

I have not seen any digital cases online. But here is a list of potential topics you need to know. It is a full list and looks scary but they test a lot of these concepts depending on the particular role:

• Basics (computational thinking, sorting, data structures) - they never ask directly but understanding will help with the other topics)
• Database design (Centralized vs decentralized, sharding, factors influencing the number of replicas - the volume of data, future scale, growth, data structure, desired speed, etc)
• Technology stacks (front, back,api, database, etc)
• Cloud (cloud vs own servers pro and cons, uptime % SLAs, load balancing, etc)
• Server storage - major cost buckets - remember about additional replicas and cooling electricity costs
• Security (encryption basics, public keys, password change policy, cloud security and encryption on your computer)
• Agile and development (Agile principles, Environments: Developing, testing, production, Native apps / web apps / hybrid apps, etc)
• M&A and IT (Will it be one system or two systems? Is it "Adopt and go" approach or we take the best of both systems and create a new one? Integrate now, innovate later? Or Innovate now, when you have time?)
• IT strategy and Digital transformation (Similar to M&A)
• IoT (Mainly the use of IoT in operations - Process steps completion, measuring temperature, maintenance measurements, other measurements, predicative algorithms, etc)

Good luck!