Business Strategy & Performance Topics
Business strategy, competitive analysis, market opportunities, and strategic innovation. Includes market research, competitive positioning, and business planning.
Strategic Business Reasoning and Prioritization
Demonstrate structured business reasoning that goes beyond raw financial metrics to include competitive positioning, customer impact, operational feasibility, and organizational capabilities. Explain prioritization frameworks and how you would set and defend priorities given limited resources, including trade offs and opportunity costs. Interviewers look for balanced judgment that integrates quantitative analysis with strategic context and practical constraints.
Business Problem Solving and Recommendations
Frameworks and skills for taking ambiguous business questions through analysis to clear, actionable recommendations. Includes decomposing complex problems into analyzable components, identifying key drivers, selecting focused analyses, synthesizing data backed findings, and articulating specific next steps and implementation considerations. Emphasizes communicating recommendations in business terms, estimating potential impact when possible, acknowledging trade offs and limitations, prioritizing among multiple actions, and tailoring communication to different stakeholders. Covers translating research or analytic results into feasible product or operational changes and defending choices with evidence.
Case and Business Frameworks
Techniques for structuring analytical and persuasive responses to business problems in interviews and real world settings. Covers the end to end approach: clarifying the situation and objectives, scoping and prioritizing issues, forming a hypothesis, and building a logical, mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive breakdown or issue tree. Includes common case interview frameworks such as profitability analysis, market entry, pricing, growth and operations, as well as business case components like problem statement, proposed solutions, cost benefit analysis, financial metrics such as return on investment and payback period, implementation plan, risk identification and mitigation, stakeholder impact, and success metrics. Emphasizes quantitative estimation and back of the envelope calculations, qualitative considerations such as competitive positioning and customer impact, synthesis into a clear recommendation, and communication techniques for telling a compelling business story under time pressure.
Business Objective Alignment & Value Creation
Ability to connect transformation initiatives to business objectives and organizational strategy. Understanding that technology is an enabler for business goals, not an end in itself. Knowing transformation investments should deliver measurable business value and competitive advantage aligned with strategy.
Problem Structuring and Analytical Frameworks
The ability to convert ambiguous business problems into clear, testable, and actionable analytical questions and frameworks. Candidates should demonstrate how to clarify the decision to be informed and success metrics, break large problems into smaller components, and organize thinking using hypothesis driven approaches, issue trees, or mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive groupings. This includes generating hypotheses, identifying key drivers and uncertainties, specifying required data sources and any necessary transformations, choosing analytical methods, estimating effort and impact, sequencing and prioritizing analyses or experiments, and planning next steps that produce evidence to guide decisions. Interviewers also assess evaluation of trade offs, recommending a decision with a clear rationale, effective communication of structure and findings, and comfort operating with incomplete information. The scope includes applying general case structuring as well as specialized frameworks such as growth funnel analysis that maps acquisition, activation, revenue, retention, and referral, audience segmentation and competitive assessment frameworks, content and channel strategy, and operational step by step approaches. For more junior candidates the emphasis is on clear structure, systematic thinking, strong rationale, and prioritized next steps rather than exhaustive optimization.
Netflix Business Model, Revenue & Cost Structure
In-depth analysis of Netflix's business model, revenue streams, pricing strategy, content costs, operating expenses, and profitability drivers, along with competitive positioning and platform economics within the streaming industry.
Spotify Business Model & Metrics
Examines Spotify's business model, including revenue streams (subscription plans, advertising, and partnerships), pricing strategy, freemium versus premium dynamics, licensing considerations, and platform economics. Covers key performance indicators such as monthly active users, subscribers, churn, ARPU, customer lifetime value, growth metrics, and competitive positioning, along with strategic decisions around content licensing, podcasts, and monetization diversification.
Business Context and Metrics Understanding
Understand the broader business context for technical or operational work and identify relevant performance metrics. This includes recognizing the key performance indicators for different functions, translating technical outcomes into business impact, scoping a problem with success metrics and constraints, and using metrics to prioritize trade offs. Candidates should demonstrate how they would frame a problem in business terms before proposing technical or operational solutions.
OKR and Metric Definition
Covers translating strategic objectives into measurable key results and operational metrics that drive the right behaviors. Topics include writing clear objectives and specific, measurable key results, distinguishing leading and lagging indicators, defining primary metrics versus guardrail metrics, selecting absolute versus relative targets, avoiding perverse incentives, and ensuring metric hygiene through reliable instrumentation and data quality checks. Also addresses setting appropriate targets and time horizons, monitoring cadence, dashboard design and alerting for metric deviations, and using metrics to inform prioritization and continuous improvement without encouraging gaming.