How to Excel at Case Interviews (and as a Business Analyst) - w/ Aditya

Welcome to the Ready Set Do podcast, where we discuss remarkable stories by regular people. In this episode, my guest is Aditya Kudhari. Aditya is a senior business analyst at Capital One Financial Services. Case interviews are a common method used by consulting firms and increasingly tech companies to assess a candidate's analytical and problem-solving skills. During a case interview, candidates work with the interviewer to identify, analyze key issues and propose solutions to business problems.

It can feel extremely daunting to have to do math while a couple people are very carefully observing your every move while also having to structure your thoughts and communicate them effectively, forming those ideas and sharing them coherently are a key aspect of case interviews. Like with most things in life, excelling at case interviews can simply be a function of your practice level as well as the resources you leverage to bring yourself up to speed.

I've had the pleasure of being coached firsthand by Aditya when I had a case interview call and even though he had at the time already cracked a couple of those himself, I remember feeling just blown away by how adept he had become with not just the ins and outs of case interviews, but also being able to conduct really effective mock interviews for and other lucky group of peers. He has helped dozens of students that continue to rely on him for his knowledge on this subject and so it really just felt like a no-brainer to have him share some of that knowledge for us on this podcast. This discussion will be helpful to anyone who's currently preparing for an upcoming case interview and also really anyone who is interested in learning about this rather intriguing form of interviewing. We cover tools, resources and strategies

to not only excel at case interviews, but also tailoring your resume to get that call in the first place. As always, all sections are time stamped on YouTube and wherever else you get your podcasts. That includes Spotify. Finally, in keeping with our theme of learning from somebody that's just two steps ahead of you, instead of a full-blown expert, I want to reiterate that this discussion centers on the ANIC data that demonstratively worked for Aditya. My goal is to merely highlight what he did to get where he wanted to get and how you can do the same. So with that, without further ado, my discussion with Aditya. Aditya, welcome to the podcast. Hi. Hi, no man. Thanks for having me.

Oh, it's it's it's my pleasure. For our listeners, Aditya and I go way back. By way back, I really only mean a couple years. I was at Purdue at the time Aditya joined in the fall of 21 for his business analytics course. We organically became friends and have continued to be friends to this day. So it is indeed my pleasure to have you here and we will be getting into the details of this in a bit. But Aditya here is a bit of an in-house expert in our entire friend group when it came to case interviews and you know all the prep that goes along with that, along with resume preparation, just the whole job search sphere as a whole. So very happy to have you here Aditya and thank you for taking the time. Do you want to start us off by a quick introduction of what made you consider

your masters in the US and how you ended up on business analytics as the course of your choice? Thanks for having me and I'm no expert. I'd like to say that I'm just going to share what I have experienced but definitely not an expert. A little bit of background about myself. I grew up in Bangalore. I did my bachelor's in computer science in Bangalore. I was a software engineer in Bangalore for a couple of years and then I decided to do my masters in business analytics in 2021. That's when I joined Purdue. There's a quick 10-month program I've graduated and I started working at Capital One of financial services company here in the US. A bit of why I chose business analytics is this story actually starts way before that in 2017 when I was in the second year of engineering. There's

this session by Bijus. A bunch of people came over to my college. They had a session and they know they spoke wonderful things about doing a masters in the US and how it's not very expensive, how you could get scholarships and how you could possibly study for free and I was sold. I enrolled into their coaching and I was done with my GRE by the time I reached my third year of engineering and then I did nothing. I graduated. I started working as a full-stack developer after my graduation and then COVID happened. My firm was in the immigration tech space so we used to build software that was used by lawyers and it got bought out during a few months after COVID helped and then the company let go a lot of people including me and that's when I totally sat down

and decided what I want to do and I enjoyed business. I enjoyed like I'm a Marvadi. I come from a family of businessmen so I have always been exposed to the business side of things but I also did not want to stop coding. I enjoyed tech too and for masters in business analytics seemed like a great idea. It's a tech program given by a business school and that's one of the reasons why I chose business analytics. Something that's recently come up by a few students from India that have reached out to me on LinkedIn and else where is that there seems to be some confusion around what might be the best time to take the GRE and some say you said you took that kind of early because I actually don't really know a lot of people that took it when they were in their third year of undergrad

or engineering so what prompted you to do that and I guess do you mind sharing how you went about preparing for that? Yep. So the nicest thing about GRE is that your scores are valid for five years and at least during my application phase no university cared how old it was as long as it was valid and I think back then what I thought was let's just get done with the exam and then I can do the other steps as and when they show up and that's one of the reasons why I got done with it in college and it's easier to do it when you're in college in retrospect work is really early hectic I know people around me who tried taking GRE while they were in while they were working it was definitely difficult for them so my idea was to just get done with it ASAP I knew

that will be valid for five years I could use it if I wanted to or I could let it be. Regarding preparation it's practice honestly the more hours you've attended the higher your score gets in GRE that this is my personal tape on it the more you practice the more you do better and I took my own sweet time I took about seven months I was slowly working through problems I just gave me a tab with a lot of content loaded so once we finished the month or two of classes I was just using the tab to get done with my preparation it's an easy exam when you're in engineering to give I have to recommend people to get done with it while they're in college and then they can decide whether they want to act on it or not yeah I like what you said about it just really boiling down to

practice because when I was preparing for it's something that I just realized out of the blue one day was that the English section is actually called verbal reasoning and there's actually a reason for that and it's that a lot of that can actually just be boiled down to more science than you know art as a lot of people associate that you know that's part of the test too which is not wrong to say exactly but you're right and that if you practice enough comprehension problems or you know fill in fill in the blinds all of that it just the things start to line up eventually you know one way or the other so I do agree with that in that it's yeah mostly you know just a function of how much practice that you can put in yeah I just I just wanted to add on to what you

said actually the way by Jews position the material of the way they thought it was they looked at all of these English comprehension problems as math problems you know they said first two lines will have xyz your next paragraph will have xyz if your first paragraph is of this language second paragraph is of this language your correct option will be of this language you know there's structure and the more you saw that structure so like I said practice definitely helps both with English and math there that's so interesting yeah to convert that you know to a math problem but yeah definitely sounds like all the engineers out there would probably be feeling really happy listening to that I want to I guess jump forward a little bit here to the you know the main critical

point of any graduate student in the US at least at once from India because at the end of the day in a lot of times and sometimes unnecessarily but it does boil down to you know employment and what you can do to not just get employment but make sure you're not leaving anything on the table in terms of the offer that you get in terms of the type of role that you're interested in because obviously you don't want to settle so can you talk us through that whole phase what that look like for you how you started applying for jobs and when the interview started coming in and how you went about to prep for that so I think preparation for job search in the US starts much before you come into the US actually starts off with the kind of degree you choose to study for example I studied business analytics where I used to be a full stack developer

so what I realized later on in my job search phase is that not a lot of people considered my experience to be analytics experience even though a lot of coding is transferable not a lot of people truly look at it that way so I inherently set myself up for a very very difficult job search phase when I chose a master's in business analytics and even if the goal of your master's is to do what I did that is change your field it's good to be aware good good to be aware that if you're going to change your fields if you have very little experience before coming to the US you it will be more difficult than the people around you which is fine you you get more time to prepare accordingly but I I'd not know this and when I started off with my job search I was up lying up lying and I was not getting any callbacks at all and I think a lot of

it was because I did not have any experience related to analytics so for you had this career services department and they did be career coaches you could book time with them and go take a resume and and you know they'll review them so after after I finished a lot of applications and I wasn't getting callbacks I set up some time with them and I went over there with my resume I still remember this very clearly he took my resume he pulled out a pencil and he started reading it and then the first point he just underlined it he put a question mark and he said so what so the I mentioned something about building a form processing dashboard using xyz languages he he asked me so what and then he went on looking at various points and he kept asking me so what what will I get if you build that dashboard and that's when I realized

that while I'm doing what I did I never really mentioned why it was important or my resume did not speak about skills that would transfer to these new roles that I'm applying to and that is where I was lacking I went back I went around to a bunch of people asking them to look at my resume the one very nice part about a business analytics program is that there are people with varying experiences around you there are people who just graduated college and then there are people with five years of experience in consulting so people from the extreme ends of the spectrum and everyone's willing to help so once I actually read it a lot of my resume and I started applying again that's when I started getting callbacks and which which essentially brings me to the point that many times it's not that you're not skilled enough or it's not that

you don't have enough experience it's just that you're not putting your past experience out there correctly and that's actually the biggest problem I recently over the few years that I've been working at Capital One of I get a bunch of people who reach out to me you know you say hey you see my resume matches the qualifications so perfectly like that's exactly what I used to do in India but nobody is giving me a call back and when I see the resume I tell them that when I read your experience it doesn't look as rich as it sounded when you mentioned it to me and I think that's part of the problem which I realized later on in the process and honestly that's when the callbacks started flowing in and for somebody like me who has very little experience like who had

very little experience in the field I'm applying for or someone who's you know like me changing fields or just generally lower experience it might take it becomes a quantity game over a quality game a lot of people you know apply to few companies the tailor the resumes and this works for people with good experience people with great companies on the profile they get callbacks and you know they're able to crack amongst those 50 but for some people they just need to you know have these weekend vendors there'd be some weekends where just coke crazy I'd apply to 200 jobs and then Monday morning the callbacks start flowing up you know even if there's two percent conversion you do want to jobs you're getting like both i callbacks and and your week is filled with

interviews then so working on my resume and just applying to a lot of jobs truly help me I really like what you said about casting that white net and how you called out that while that works for most people it's not the only solution out there so um Pragya who has been a guest on this podcast actually had the exact opposite of viewpoint to yours and that checks out though because her entire experience right from her first job at a fresh out of college was all around the e-commerce domain so she did e-commerce in India and her internship here was an e-commerce and then it just you know just kind of aligned for her in that way where it made sense to Taylor fit her resume around that niche that obviously her resume was full of and clearly worked for her because she's now involved with the e-commerce domain of amazon so that totally

checks out I did have a couple questions around things you mentioned before so firstly you said that despite you working in a software job so you mentioned you were a full stack developer you said that that experience didn't entirely translate to when you were looking for jobs in the u.s so for a lay person like me it sounds like those two are often not always but there's a certain amount of overlap between you know a full stack developer and most jobs around analytics so do you mind going over what some of those defenses are in that what makes them separate and why you were struggling to translate the experience that you had and you you called out that it didn't it wasn't even counting it felt like so how did you address that I guess and also how did you realize that that was the thing that was happening so uh when I initially

built started writing my resume what it did was I put in all the greatest projects the greatest achievements the most impactful projects in place so for example my team worked on building a dashboard and it's completely a big revamp of a very old system we had in place uh we we achieved you know great adoption numbers and this is a really really big project that succeeded and I was really personally proud and biased about it so I wrote you know very nice sentences about it but uh you know I spoke about all the complex tech I use I spoke about you know fujs.net c# but then I'm applying to roles where uh your job is to actually pull data using SQL you do some processing using Excel uh Python you'd put some put out some graphs using Tableau or some Power BI tools and then

come up with some solutions and you inform strategy with it uh some roles have more weightage on one part than the other so that's essentially what an analyst does in this space my great backend software development skills don't really uh have any value but then there's this very small project that I worked where uh our queries were taking a lot of time to process so uh I um worked on it to make it faster and that was actually a big hit you know I have recruiters sometimes asked me about it or having managers asked me about it like how did you really optimize it what was the bottleneck there and and so it's it's the look for experience that is in the languages that the job demands in uh concepts that the job demands demands rather than things that have

been impactful in your past and if both of these uh coincide then that's fantastic to you and get a star candidate but uh it did not for me a lot of my uh greatest achievements were front and related uh back and uh dot nancy shop related and my smaller projects were in data and analytics and once I made the smaller project shine that's when I it started working out for me that makes sense um and then one last note on that resume session that you had so my takeaway from there was all of your resume bullets must answer the question so what like no matter what you're trying to say uh whatever project you worked on it needs to answer the so what um how does one go about actually doing that though do you have maybe an example because I know it's good to use power

verbs and it helps to start and I know if you just google power verbs you get like a list of words that you can use but um do you have an example to illustrate what that may look like when somebody's going from um you know a current bullet which is not answering the so what to something that's much more impactful that does in fact answer the so what i think the first step is to uh go back and think about what all happened when you did a particular project or the project that you're mentioning uh let's take the same example you know the the the one project that I mentioned in the first line of my life you may wear you know we built a new uh this entire infrastructure and a form processing dashboard that was used by people you know I spoke about the you know complex

languages that went into it and that we delivered it but then uh when I went back and I thought about it you know I remember these small meetings where you know we we spoke about we we accelerated getting 100% adoption within three months which uh uh I didn't think was important because no we delivered such a complex project I was focusing on the complexity of it uh which which software engineers should uh that that's that's what software engineers do but then if if I was were to look at it from my product manager's perspective he was gonna boast about uh uh that you know that we we got adoption in three months we're gonna boast about how uh time spent on a particular form on an average decrease by two minutes which didn't seem that important to me but

earlier but then uh so I rephrased it to say I worked on a new form processing dashboard which reduced uh average time spent on a form by two minutes increase and drove adoption and and achieve 100% adoption in three months um you also also you need to pick and choose your achievement based on the kind of rules you're applying for yeah uh that that's also very important thing to do product analyst would care more about maybe KPIs and uh growth whereas if if you are uh applying for a business intelligence uh engineer position then they would care more about your visualization aspect yeah and how you were able to use that data to you know tell the story that makes me proud because you can have 20 different hearts on a power bi report but that's not necessarily a good report in that it you know it really doesn't help drive any

decision so to speak which is the whole point of most dashboards at least yeah it's exactly exactly so uh uh go to Taylor your resume a lot right um and then are you a proponent of having different like versions of resumes for different positions and I know that things can get fairly hairy fairly quick because what if somebody's looking at you know five ish different positions that they may be interested in in that case would you would recommend that that person just has five different resumes or would you say that maybe three which with you know slightly bigger buckets in terms of the experience when those three is a better move how would you recommend somebody that has just kind of a really generous general profile um how how would they approach this situation I would very strongly recommend uh having buckets like you mentioned

that's what I did I had a resume for a business analyst position I had a resume for a data scientist position and then I had a resume for an analytics engineer position which would you know somewhere be somewhere between data science and business uh and this so I did have a few buckets of resumes and uh what I noticed was that a combination of three or four resumes would help you target most rules that you want to target that being said you know sometimes you come across these roles that you really really resonate with and then uh you also get these you know great good quality referrals someone saying hey I'm hiring someone in my team send away send away your resume that's when I would put in the extra effort to tailor my resume for that position you look up all these

ATS systems that I can try to get as high as a score as I it can be this is very rare cases and definitely capitalize on those if you get a chance to otherwise a few buckets of resumes should work fine uh even even if some people ask me uh I'm applying to do different types of rules in the same company what if I use different resumes there and I tell them it doesn't matter unless you're lying a lot on your resumes and you're saying my first title uh was a product engineer and here I'm writing product analyst if if you're lying like that then it's definitely a problem but if it's uh if the points are different then it's okay because in a year or two years of experience you work on so many things just mention two three so uh I recommend buckets of resumes Gotcha and what's your approach around referrals on LinkedIn so not just

you know cold cold DMs to um reach out to people say you apply for a job and it says who posted it and obviously you want to put in a good note for yourself so you reach out um and so first of all is that something that you would recommend and if so um there's generally two rules around this like either you're very you know polite and subdued and just are like hey I exist and the second approach is just like hey I really want this job so which which where do you land on that debate I think first of all I think the two aspects here uh how important are referrals and then uh how do you get referrals or how do you reach out to people uh the first question is about the importance of referrals I personally feel time here is more important than referrals so if a role opened up

and I wanted I was interested in it I would spend a little time reaching out to people waiting for a response if I didn't get a response uh I would just go ahead and apply now uh there is no uh hard and fast rule on how long to wait but I didn't wait for more than a day because it might be right it might be wrong but you know I had the bias of applying early I don't know how to hundred resumes are being processed at all but I just felt uh that if I applied early it might go in front of more eyes I don't know it might be true it might not be true but um I was generally biased towards uh I get more about the time I used that referrals that being said when I was in college uh if if a company was giving callbacks to a lot of people I would use an answer for that

so if you feel you see people around you so when I was applying capital one was giving a lot of callbacks discover was giving a lot of callbacks so I reached out to people uh uh from these companies and I like to go back yeah if your friends are getting callbacks from one or two companies then I would definitely recommend getting a referral now uh to how you are getting a referral my take is that um I'm I'm generally busy today at work uh I go to work uh with hybrid now so people at office move the time you come back uh there are a bunch of things that keep popping up on your phone and um uh during job search phase there's so many people reaching out to you I don't know if I have the time to sit and say hi hello how are you doing etc but what I like seeing is when someone sends

me a message they say uh hi xyz hi I'm doing xyz right now I have three years of experience in xyz I'm looking for a referral in these roles and I think I aligned with it so um but that's great you know you told me what your experience was uh you told me you worked for three years in Accenture that's pretty great I think capital one likes people like these I'm gonna uh yeah I'll respond right now I'll ask you for your email or what I need for a referral and I'll refer you if you're gonna say hi how are you doing uh I'm great to connect it's great I'm happy to connect with you but I don't know if I'm gonna respond to that just because there's no fire the people who texted me you know with some substantial content uh which I I'd like to respond to and

one thing that I used to feel when I was applying is that a lot of firms are these big referral bonuses so it's in their benefit to refer you to so you need to tell them you're looking for a referral and you want to give them a small idea of why you might clear that interview and help them get that referral bonus and that's why I'm a big fan of just shamelessly asking for a referral I think that's such an accelerated point where there's two yeah it's a win-win situation if somebody you help manages to get that position so I think that's a really interesting perspective and with that I think we are ready to you know jump into the crux of the matter here this little can of worms called case interviews so tell us about um you know how it was when you first I guess found out about them because I certainly did not know such a thing existed

and you obviously had a big part in not just educating me about what it is but you know also coaching me I remember you took at least three more cases that I can remember how did you first approach finding out about case interviews and what was your approach to preparing for them so uh yeah case interview is very new to me too uh I'm software engineer right like uh we we don't uh solve business problems you know we've always written code I spent a lot of my time changing colors of buttons on the website so uh case interview is so so so new to me uh when I started interviewing uh and and you know I I do the I did the first thing we all do that is sit in Google what case interviews are you know I find a bunch of material and you start preparing on it but the more I spend time with it the more I truly understand the nature of it and

uh it's not just back then over the last two years I've been regularly doing more cases with a bunch of people who've been uh interviewing with both with my company capital on and elsewhere so I think very very simple words case interviews are just you and the interviewer trying to solve a business problem it's very different from your normal interviews where you know they're testing your knowledge they're asking you what is x what is y what is z or even if you look at coding interviews where they are testing your skills but uh I've given a lot of software uh coding interviews also and and you know they ask you all of these very complex uh questions and algorithms that you actually do not use in your day-to-day life but case interviews they try to give you

problems that the company might have faced in the past or a problem that resonates with them so you know they'll they'll they'll try to um ask questions that I don't understand your uh how you speak you know so many skills they measure they try to measure communication the way you manage your time with pressure you know they're sometimes putting pressure on you sometimes you have case interviews with like two three people who are uh asking you questions um and you have to do math in front of them it's not just the answering questions you literally have to do math while three people watch on also around you exactly yeah and around your point on um the interviewer works with you what percentage of that would you say you know the interview we does versus the

interviewer so there are uh two types of cases actually uh it's a summer interviewer led and summer interview led uh interviewer led cases are cases where uh interviewers lead the conversation they are giving you numbers they are providing you more information uh and and over here I'd say it's 20 30 30 80 whereas interview led cases you uh keep asking for more information and then when you hit the right uh uh right switch that's when you are given more information so uh I'm sure this I'm giving an oversimplified version of it the obviously more complex differences but then uh in an interview led cases you are seeking and then as you seek you keep getting more and more information and then you go towards the solution interview led cases are more have more involvement of the interviewer

and and they they're uh I think mostly in non-consulting uh cases it's interviewer led where you know given more information and you have to solve and come up with solutions and speak to them about it and that's where actually uh I have experience and I've actually never been a consultant or a given consulting interview so I would not speak a lot about consulting but in in the non-consulting case world um yeah you can find more interview led cases so was your uh I know you took at least a few different of those but most of your experience was around the interviewer led where you were mostly um answering questions and hoping you were saying the right things yeah yeah yeah that's true actually at least in my experience a lot of these cases even if you're wrong they will not say

you are wrong they will actually ideate with you they'll say but your right sales may increase but you know there might be cannibalization when you're launching this product might eat up your other product and and uh you'll come up with a counter or sometimes you know when you give your numbers they'll be like that does not seem right are you sure about that I thought it'll be XYZ so you know they're very subtle but they had tried to correct you when you're wrong and and that's uh a lot of case interviews they do try to correct you because the goal is to get to the solution work together and get to the solution that's what happens in a in your work environment right you make mistakes people correct you you work on them and and dealing with mistakes also you know it's very important I think I think a part of it is they disagree with you

just to look at your humility they they you know sometimes you know I remember this one interview where I gave a recommendation when the interview said no I don't think that's right uh there's XYZ that might happen that might just not work and you know for a second you know you you you you you you've thought a lot you've given a really really great recommendation and they completely say no to you now uh you know sometimes you know I could either argue more or I could you know assert my point even more or I could go back look at the data and say no there's XYZ data and this is what it is or I could agree with that disagreement I could say yeah maybe I was wrong you're actually right uh there's XYZ data that shows that you're right so uh I think it's it's it's so many things

they look at in these case interviews that that make them very very interesting in my opinion and also a great great way to uh find people great people how did you end up reacting to that by the way with that situation around when the person said no that's wrong do you I'm just curious too so uh you know that I think if I recall correctly it was a case related to uh buying an apartment complex and um they gave a bunch of numbers and uh it looked like it was gonna take about four or five years to break even uh they asked me if it was a good idea to buy it I said yes I think it's a good idea to buy it and while I was um when I jump into the reasons they didn't say but seven years you know such a long duration does not work you know you don't know what will happen uh I think

over there uh what I felt was the lot of the numbers that they gave uh initially if that would that translated to fixed costs and variable costs were uh very inflated and there was a lot of ways to really reduce them to bring them to multiple numbers and that was the premise of my argument was that I actually asked for some time I also reduced these numbers I decided what appropriate numbers were numbers were I recalculated a break even period and told them I did xyz calculation and my new calculations is that if if we were to achieve these numbers we would break even in two years and I think that's a really really great say investment like that uh I think yeah I was able to uh luckily uh that we had time and I was able to get up come up with numbers and and over here

again there is no right answer I think the the the and I knew that that there is no right answer I just wanted to present a really smart answer to them and and that's what I tried doing honestly over here right sometimes in case interviews you've got to think how to score those extra points rather than just you know being right it's okay to be wrong if you show that you're a really good analyst absolutely did you want to walk us through what the general case looks like that people are generally presented yep I know you normally start with a premise and then there's some um questions to be answered and sometimes there may or may not be the need for recommendations in the end I know that's a oversimplified scenario that's just from what I remember which I'm shocked I even remember that much if I'm being honest but yeah did you want to walk

us through what that looks like in practice yep so uh I think uh taking a step back over her uh we've been speaking about case interviews but uh I think yeah it's truly important to understand what happens here and and uh before we deep dive into what exactly happens uh it's important to know that there are different types of cases and different roles demand cases you know a lot of these cases are business problems but you know a business context is placed and questions asked but case interview is actually not limited to that many times a data science positions ask I have case interviews where they expect a very and very data science and strategy answers sometimes they'll send you a link in the middle of the case interview and uh you know it'll open

our court signal uh or seem long of a coding uh interface and then there'll be two more questions over there some based on the context you've gotten so uh a bunch of uh some case interviews are take home you go home you do some assignment you build a deck and you come back and then you start working with the interviewer on those cases they'll go through a solution they'll ask you questions as you were presenting to stakeholders and your company at work so um but generally uh when you look at these business cases there are a very big broad contact a broad open ended question uh where they know they try to set up context and they ask you some basic uh that's a very basic question you know uh they're there and uh the goal of a year is to see how you structure your thoughts

uh and and this is very very important in case interviews is uh if they're they're evaluating in how you think uh what you think so uh uh for example you know let's let's uh go over these with some examples um one of my cases they asked they said uh you know the first question was uh imagine that you are a company that sells prescription glasses online you're planning on opening brick and motor stores you want to go offline what are the various things you'll consider before uh starting this so we heard uh uh they're essentially trying to see uh since there's just so many ideas you know there's hundreds of ways you can answer this question and there is no right way to answer this question but there's definitely wrong ways to answer this question and that is

you know have keep saying random thoughts and ideas and uh you know get a lot of frameworks online i would i would approach this question with something like you know i would look at uh the market attractiveness i would see is there a market for people who want to buy it offline then i would look at i know a bunch of aspects under market attractiveness to truly see if that market is attractive if selling offline uh is is there any revenue is it already happening and then i'd look at competitive landscape where um we'd want to understand the other people that are working in this space other people that are people they let you enter this space or not uh is it to entry essentially yes yes barriers to entry and all of those and then i would look at uh my capabilities

i'm a as a company am i capable of doing that uh do i have the expertise i need well i need to hire people outside what kind of uh investments will this demand what kind of and even more than investments many times they did just involve you know very different kind of people who are experts in this or you'll have to hire a lot of consulting firms and then finally i'll look at profitability like will it actually drive additional revenues uh should i survey my customers existing customers to see if they want something uh uh so these are the four buckets i would put them in again over here there is no right answer uh some people like to approach uh this as cost drivers profit drivers or cost drivers revenue drivers and then uh they speak about this uh and it doesn't really

matter as long as you've covered few important points and you've covered them in a very structured manner uh it's important to be uh to not intermix you don't keep repeating points and don't mix don't talk about revenue under a cost driver don't talk about cost under a revenue driver and what's a good amount or just in terms of a rule of thumb what's a good amount of time to spend before you start responding because it sounds like if if this for me i would obviously you know first try to um first start to jot down thoughts what i'm feeling and but obviously that would be linear i would not be writing six different thoughts at once so is the right approach to all of your points both for let's say we go with the revenue drivers versus cost drivers and then say them all at once or is it sometimes okay to just start saying what

you have especially if you're if you're not able to think of too many points and then you know hope that you know more more points come to you as you as you're speaking i think uh nobody like someone that starts answering as soon as the questions given in the case interviews uh it just shows that if not thought a lot and honestly i i would recommend taking a minimum of a minute and a maximum of uh 90 seconds or maybe even two minutes uh to answer this question because uh i think the first question is very important uh you start off on the right foot yeah yeah you can do the right back from if you're you know just not meeting exactly any sense yeah yeah exactly and uh again i might be wrong over here but i think it's it's great to have the interviewer like you from the

first moment itself because yeah how much they want to correct you it's just their bias they can decide you decide to correct you a lot or they might decide to correct you a little less than that and that might really be a game changer for you and uh so so i i want to set off the premise really really well right off the bat from the first question and and that's where um that's why it's really really important to take some time i would word vomit like i said you don't need to have many points would you think of four points and you think structure them correctly draw your charts graphs whatever you can structure them correctly it's it's here it's a lot about quality over here than the quantity of your points and then you mention it and then um sometimes what

happens is they will uh ask you uh is that all do you think anything else is there in the revenue that's where you know you got a that's when you can uh you'll realize that they're looking for something so think more and in in that particular area where they're asking you and try to answer that because they'll keep sometimes probing you until they get that one word out and then they'll start giving you numbers or more questions related to that i see so that's the starting premise where you're just objectively thinking about a business situation in terms of either revenues costs or portals five forces whatever it may be and then let's say we're at that phase where you know you were able to satisfactorily um align on with the interviewer all the important points around that

premise so what happens from that point so uh they will go ahead they will maybe ask an other qualitative question you know something like uh okay uh find you decided to uh open your uh brick and motor stores uh where will you open that or or what they can do is they can start giving off numbers saying you know they cost x y z amount of money uh how long do you think you're gonna break even and uh the one thing that i've seen across these case interviews and their math is that the math is actually very simple it's it's your basic g r e g math math but uh it's it's you know forming these equations or putting these numbers in the right places that's where people mess up i've seen a lot of people say that you know they've made silly mistakes and that's just because you know

they're just so uh their questions are designed the numbers are designed to uh be tricky uh just to see how thorough you are they will give you five data points varying between one being weekly one being monthly one being annual so you'll have to bring them to the same unit they'll say some in million some in thousands so uh it's it's it's a lot about getting the right numbers and putting them in the correct places than about math the math is actually very simple in all of these case interviews so yeah there will be uh uh general math question usually uh at least in non-consulting cases once that is done um they will go back to you know if the break even period is too long they will ask okay do you think it's a good idea if yes great if not you've got to give reasons why

and and then they give you more and then it becomes a repetitive they give you more numbers you do some math and then you go back to giving more solutions sometimes you know they ask very different questions sometimes yeah i was asked a marketizing question like how many people in the US do you think uh wear glasses etc sometimes they will ask you to draw a graph and show it on screen uh oh that also happens so a lot of things uh yeah there's like there's a lot of things that they can ask in a case interview but the general rule applies everywhere take your time structure your answers uh make sure your math is right and respond to them it does really sound like it's the presence of mind almost that's the underlying theme you know being able to stay calm under pressure because

i've been there and i'm has a view but it is a substantial amount of pressure to you know be doing all of this in front of you know a stranger so i think yeah all of those are really good rules of thumb and i i guess you did mention that but i kind of want to re-rehighlight just the importance of practicing um which brings me to my next point which is that what what are some resources or tools that you found particularly helpful when you were preparing for case interviews no um i think the two aspects uh when it comes to preparation one is just studying the other one is practice so in starting you find a bunch of material online i'll speak about the material i fused which i like and uh which i recommend to people but this is not the only ones out there

and they don't always work for everybody one is uh victor cheng if you google uh content from victor cheng i will be adding all of these links to the show notes so yeah awesome uh yeah you'll you'll find a bunch of youtube uh content or or uh websites with uh stuff a walk from victor cheng he he has a lot of information about these frameworks you can use to answer these qualitative questions that you have in place and then there is this book called case in point by and the initial part of case in point is good they again talk about a lot of structures and setting up context and they have a bunch of example cases these example cases are very very consulting heavy so if you're not really going to be doing consulting case interviews i don't think you'd need that

uh much knowledge you'd rather use your time uh in um getting some more domain specific fake or that case interview specific skill and uh but what i mean by this domain specific skill is for example capital one cases are math heavy so i'd practice a lot of math i'd pull out g r e g might try to practice math if if you're uh doing a case that might be uh you know slightly technical in nature where you know this chance they might ask you to write some code or or talk about some technique you would use uh um ml technique you would use to solve this problem then i'd rather prepare for that then uh spend time on these consulting uh case examples reach out to uh alumni to or really shamelessly ask the recruiter what kind of case it's going to be you know what

what could i expect uh what other things you test me uh or what kind of math uh questions will be there nothing to lose by asking they will share whatever they are allowed to share and um that's great so i think studying uh here you you essentially build uh context on some basic frameworks you can use that can apply to a bunch of cases you look at a lot of practice problems and see how people are solving them uh if you learn a lot one thing to note uh one thing uh one point of is that i had this object and i'm sure you did too called strategic management i learned so many things in that uh yeah object and then as i uh started reading this case interviews i started seeing that you know so many of these business buzzwords being used in a lot of examples and it's very

very important i think to you know pick up on these buzzwords i actually had a list of like 30 buzzwords i just wrote down these buzzwords so rather remind myself to use them in the interviews whether i use them uh in my day to day uh speaking or not um and then coming to uh practice so um my first interview in the US was actually uh wafer it's an online furniture retailer here and and it was also a case interview i studied a lot i studied so much i studied everything i couldn't think of and uh i went over there to that interview in an absolutely dang did i was so bad i was doing silly mistakes i was unable to answer properly i was my thoughts were all over the place and and and i realized that i did not practice i just i studied everything everything was in my mind but i did not practice

and that's why i danged everything and i think that do more cases with your friends i was lucky enough to have a bunch of smart people around me so and willing to help each other and i could do so many mocks with people who are already interviewing giving case interviews people who have done case interviews in the past um if your friends are unwilling to help uh find people on linkedin i i i thought you were gonna say find better friends no no that might work too but uh yeah well yeah people on linkedin and i think as last resort family i suppose because really it's just reading of a script you know they they're not the ones that have to actually do things they're just reading sentences so you get your family ask them to ask questions say answers out and then

sit and think if you said it right uh and i knew they they take care of the logistical aspect like high time is up etc etc or use youtube so you will find so much material oh also i forgot to mention there's this channel called hacking the case interview uh that i really like a bunch of material on different types of cases uh you have time to prepare just go watch those videos hacking case and the case interview the channels great coming back to this is a lot of practice cases you find online so i would recommend uh go wait for them to ask the question pause say answer within the time you want to use and then listen to them because they also solve and they will talk about the things that they would mention see if if you're you're not getting a few points close to them that that's

great you're thinking the way these really professional people with a lot of experience and case interviews are uh hitting so um do that that works youtube also is actually a great great resource content there is limitless and you can practice awesome um yeah i think we've covered a lot of ground hopefully a lot of really helpful ground around you know almost this enigma of case interviews um i feel like that's really all the things i wanted to cover on this episode at least i know there we might be doing a mock interview down the road just to give listeners a flavor of what it's exactly like as it's one last note uh what's been your um experience uh working in in the u.s um so far since since you've graduated what's that been like i think you've been uh uh lucky and

privileged enough to be of a part of this uh corporate america that we see in uh movies and we hear about growing up it's great i think the work is cutting edge my team works on trying to predict how much money we're going to make off of a customer in their lifetime so the work is pretty interesting uh people are interesting the people from all over the world uh here so in you know you work with people from so many countries so many cultures it's really fun i do not have any uh complaints i have only good things to say uh luckily but so that's that's so nice of you to say and for me to hear but yeah once again thank you so much for being on here and walking us through all the steps that you took to um not just land the position that you have currently

but also all the work that you do on linkedin um around students that reach out to you for help and pointing them to those resources and i know sometimes even helping prepare them for their mock interview so um yeah please keep doing all of that good stuff and i will for this for good measure link your linkedin in the show notes as well just so people can know where to find you but thank you so much Aditya and i will catch you soon thank you thanks for having me bye that brings us to the end of episode three of the ready said to podcast i want to share that i have just been blown away by the number of messages and mostly encouraging feedback that i've gotten from all of our listeners i'm very happy to report that a lot of the strategies that we discussed on the

previous episode around how to become a tech program manager has proven helpful for a lot of people out there i cannot thank you all enough for sharing these conversations with those that continue to benefit from these if you would like to get in touch with any suggestions or to nominate a guest for the podcast please feel free to comment below the like button alternatively i will leave my instagram in the description for you to reach out hope this discussion helps you in cracking your next case interview and until then ready set do