Dear A,

When you get lost in the middle of the case, then I would recommend you to go back to your structure and look at it again. If you're still not confident about right direction where your structure brings you, then I recommend you to put your efforts in creating clear and understandable structure.

If you need any help or advice on how to make it, feel free to reach out.

Best,
André

Hi Anonymous,

I am afraid you are looking at the symptom here, and not at the root cause.

From what you describe briefly in the summary, it looks to me as if you do a wrong job in the first place building your hypothesis in the very beginning of the case and afterwards wondering why you did not guess that one right.

Many candidates I meet are somewhat too much influenced by Victor Cheng. Although he offers a lot of excellent advice, including a strong focus on the hypothesis-driven approach (which really helps many candidates sharpening and focusing their thinking along the case!), stating a hypothesis at the very beginning of the case usually turns out to be more counterproductive than helpful.

Unless you are an experienced hire with a strong focus on exactly that one case question to discuss, stating a hypothesis right at the beginning of the case interview is essentially nothing else than poaching with a stick in the dark and guessing around. And here you are: you are perfectly set for a highly unstructured and confusing start into your case! (Please note that even as experienced hire, you might be completely wrong with your hypothesis, especially in the slightly artificial case interview world - so I would not even strongly recommend the early hypothesis there)

However, at the same time it's also a matter of defining 'hypothesis'. If you look at your structure at the beginning of the case interview, it is basically the connection between the current client situation and a specific goal you want to achieve. In other words, this initial structure is also a kind of hypothesis which elements you need to consider and analyze in order to clearly understand the root cause and develop a solution for that. So essentially you can also consider your structure as some kind of hypothesis.

Apart from that technicality, the correct time to explicitly state a hypothesis during your analysis phase is when you have collected some initial data and you start 'connecting the dots'. Once some distinct pieces of your analysis guide you into one specific direction, then it's the correct time to explicitly state your hypothesis and focus in on 'verifying' (in the non-scientific way) your hypothesis!

Hope that helps - if so, please be so kind to give it a thumbs-up with the green upvote button below!

Robert

Hi there,

This is a very very common problem! I see it all the time.

Ultimately, expect to see the unexpected. In all aspects of your interview (and your future job), take on a mindset of: "I will not expect what is coming. I will adapt continuously based on new information as it comes through"

Here are some tips for you.

How to better brainstorm when stuck

1. Practice/Prepare - The more you practice cases, read case studies and articles (The Economist, The FT, etc), the more "example" you'll have, as you just have more base knowledge to work with.
2. Repivot and Frame - Pause. And look at the ideas you've come up with. Talk to the interview with you frame/group them. This 1) Shows them you can organise your thoughts 2) Helps you gain some time AND identify potential holes yourself 3) Gives them a window to point you in the right direction (they might say "Ok, that's a good bucket, but it's missing something" or " You're missing a bucket that relates to what you';ve said here")
3. Ask for Help - This is a tricky one to navigate, but you can ask questions or make statements that try to glean more information from them. For example, "I'm out of ideas, but have any competitors excelled in any areas"..."Do we have any analysis on this?"..."etc. etc.

How to "Ask for Help" or "Buy Time" When Stuck

1) State that you're now figuring out where to take this next (that's fine)

2) Recap the objective and the pieces of information you need (and have) to answer the question/hypothesis.

a) Hopefully this triggers something or b) You get a signal from the interviewer on a particular segment (they might probe you and say "is that all we need from bucket x?"

2) If this doesn't work, start to probe in different areas (i.e. do we know x? To double-check you already said y doesn't apply, correct?) etc. etc.

3) If really desperate, you can say something like "Has the client experienced this before or have any ideas they've come up with?" or "Have we observed something similar to this problem in the past that we can leverage?"

How to Ask Good Questions When Stuck

You need to picture yourself at the client site, in front of a whiteboard, with your team, figuring out what you need to do next on this project.

Truly reflect on what you need, what you're missing, or what you don't currently understand about the situation. Then, ask questions to fill this in.

This is super hard to learn, and impossible to teach through some written tips/techniques. I'd be happy to give you a crash course in this - 1 hour is all you need to have a complete mindset shift in this area!