Establishing an Option Set

Once you’ve got the problem scoped and guiding principles established, it’s about doing the leg work to understand what are the potential options for the decision and how well they align with the guiding principles.

Three key things to consider as you talk through or work through a strategic decision:

How do you rigorously prioritize different leads based on your intuition and back-of-the-envelope sizing?

For talking through behavioral questions, remember that your interviewer doesn’t have the business context you may have had, so spelling out the thought process is super important.

For cases, being familiar with companies’ priorities and business models can go a long way to helping you skip over basic questions and dive into the biggest opportunities.

There’s always more to uncover than there is time, so being hypothesis-driven here is critical. Remember, your hypotheses don’t have to be right. They just have to further your understanding of the problem at hand.

How do you operationally gather the information necessary to think through the option set?

While the question may not be explicitly about data acumen or stakeholder management, this is a great opportunity to demonstrate some of those skills in conjunction.

Of course, during an interview, you won’t have the opportunity to fully dive into data collection, so it’s an opportunity to demonstrate how you would go about gathering specific information or working cross-functionally to bring the experts necessary information.

This is also a great place to highlight a nuanced understanding of the business by identifying opportunities and risks.

How can you connect the assessment of the opportunities back to the original goal and principles of the decision?

Make sure you bring every piece of analysis or conversation back to why it matters to the initial business problem. Notice that because we already have the guiding principles established, it’s like having a rubric, and assessing options becomes easy.

When summarizing, remember to start with the answer first, then add some details on how you reached that recommendation, articulate key risks / next steps, and reiterate your answer.

Recap

The core of bizops could be said to be -- from all the potential things we may do, what should we do? Why? And how? Establishing an option set and prioritizing is the final step. Interviewers want to see a clean, clear set of options that ties back to business goals, and is realistic in terms of resources and the external business environment. If you've effectively drilled down in the previous two steps, this shouldn't be too hard.

To show you can establish a quality option set:

• Continuously tie back to guiding principles & problem scope defined earlier.
• Be realistic -- but don't be afraid to get creative! Interviewers love to see out-of-the-box solutions that make sense given the prompt. Staying hypothesis-driven is a good way to check yourself.
• Use the opportunity to show data acumen and stakeholder management skills. Articulate what data you'd need to answer the question, how you'd get it, and how you'd work through potential issues with relevant stakeholders.
• Don't forget to identify trade-offs and potential risks before recapping your recommendation.
• When you do recap, be clear -- give your answer first, justify, reiterate open questions, then give a few next steps.