How to solve unconventional cases?

I remember after a month and a half into practice, I had become comfortable doing profitability and guesstimate cases. I was beginning to get a hang of market entry & pricing cases as well. However, I found unconventional cases the most challenging and was worried that I am not able to solve them well. And so I would ask all my buddies and seniors for unconventional cases.

It is for this reason we have included a separate section on unconventional cases in Case Interviews Cracked consisting of 5 cases.

So why do unconventional cases seem challenging?

For one, there is no set structure of doing them. For most other types of cases after practicing them, you have an idea of the approach you will generally apply.

For profitability cases, you have the profit framework.

For guesstimates you are aware of the supply side and demand side approaches.

For market entry cases you have iterated several times on your own unique framework till you’re reasonably comfortable with it.

However, for unconventional cases by virtue of them being ‘unconventional’ you have to develop a customised approach to solve them during the interview. [This is true for other types of cases too, but in the later stages of the case]

After practicing several such cases, I realised the most important aspect of these unconventional cases is to first convert an initial vague problem statement to a definite objective or MECE sub-objectives.

Let’s look at two examples to understand this point further. We’ll skip the Preliminary Questions section and move directly onto what should be the Overall Approach.

Its the year 2014, Narendra Modi is the prime-ministerial candidate for the BJP. Rahul Gandhi is the face of the Congress party which is facing anti-incumbency. If you were hired by the Congress party to frame their election strategy, what would you do?

Give this question a shot. How would you structure the problem yourself?

Hint

You might be thinking of election issues, of campaign strategy, who should be the prime ministerial candidate of the party and so forth.

While these are all important topics to cover, they need to be fit into a comprehensive approach. Here is one of the ideas you could break the problem statement to something more quantifiable and then proceed.

Overall Approach

Election strategy should be one which allows the party to win majority seats in the Lok Sabha so they can hold power at the centre. There are ~550 odd seats in the Lok Sabha. To win, we would need 226. Lets break-down the ~550 seats by different states, and see how we can win the maximum in each state.

Uttar Pradesh: 80 odd

State 2: XX

State 3: YY

— — — —

From this point, you can delve into state level election strategies and softer aspects of the case dealing with qualitative matter. You can then identify common themes to set a national level agenda.

Let’s take another example

You wake up in the middle of a lonely island and have no memory of how you reached there. You need to find a way to reach home, what would you do?

Take two minutes to think how you would structure this problem down.

Not a hint

Here again, you can divide the abstract objective into MECE sub-objectives, in this case

1. Survival
2. Finding a way home

Survival can further be broken down to

1. Food & Water
2. Protection

Finding a way home can be broken along three types of routes

1. Air
2. Water
3. Land

To see the complete solution to this case, you can watch this video (19:34 onwards)

So if there is one skill you had to master to do unconventional cases well, it would be to develop a customised overall approach or issue tree for the same.

PS-If you have alternative approaches for the above questions, please mention them in the comments section.

~Saransh Garg

www.caseinterviewscracked.com