Description

The first four minutes of a case decide most of what follows. A clean structure buys you an interviewer who is rooting for you. A generic one — profitability equals revenue minus costs, delivered flat — buys you an interviewer who has already started writing notes. This package is the opening only. We run case starts over and over: prompt, clarifying questions, structure, and the walk-through. Then we reset and do it again with a different prompt. What we work on: (1) Clarifying questions that earn their time. Two good ones beat six that stall. (2) Structures built for the case in front of you, not pulled off a shelf. Interviewers can tell instantly, and a memorized framework applied to the wrong problem is worse than no framework. (3) MECE that's actually MECE — buckets that don't overlap and don't leave a hole a partner can drive through. (4) Walking the interviewer through it. Same structure, said two ways, scores very differently. This is the part almost nobody practices. (5) The hypothesis. Where to state one, how strong to make it, and how to hold it without getting married to it. We won't finish many full cases in here, and that's the point — you'll do more openings in one session than most candidates do in a month.