How to best structure for comparison with competitors to have a MECE approach?

Hi!

First of all and most important - your initial structure should not be necessarily MECE. This is one of the most common misconceptions. If you look at the consulting client proposals - the structures there are not MECE most of the time. However, your structures during the case the should be MECE all the time.

Secondly - I would put competition separately from the market branch.

In the market you look at:

• size
• growth rates
• segmentation, growth rates of the segments
• regulation
• trends

In the competition you look at:

• Market shares
• Growth rates
• Profits
• Unit economics (products, price, cost per unit)
• Key capabilities

As you can imagine you can't look at 12 bullet points simply under the market bucket

Thirdly - it's totally fine to compare things with the competitors in any other bucket. It's called benchmarking and it's just one of the consulting tools. In reality, the numbers you get will simply depend on the tables / charts that the interviewer has. It can be the case that you get the information about the company in the competitor's bucket if that's the comparison the interviewer has printed in his table

Best

Dear A,

in general a good structure can be evaluated by a certain depth and breadth. The “depth” should be at least 3-4 levels while the “breadth” should cover the entire solution space. You can cross-check this with the MECE principles (For details see respective article on Preplounge), but the CE (collectively exhaustive) part is basically defining your breadth.

Finally, make sure to check for inter-linkages in your structure and point them out.

Simon