Introduction to Strategic Decision-making

One of the main goals of a bizops team is to guide strategic decisions that sit across multiple teams or business units. They have long-term impact on resource allocation and business direction. Often, incentives are often not aligned for existing teams to answer them, hence the need for bizops support.

While cross-functional relationships play a huge role in making strategic decisions, we will dive into that skill set in another module.

How BizOps Interviews Test for Strategic Decision-making

Typically, strategic decision-making is tested in two different places: case and behavioral interviews.

Case: the interviewer is testing your ability to break down ambiguous problems and prioritize potential solutions by asking you to solve a hypothetical problem.

Behavioral: the interviewer is looking for you to talk through the process you use to think through strategic decisions, usually through an actual example. The interviewer cares less about the outcome and a lot more about how you got to that outcome. That’s what the rest of this module will be about -- highlighting some techniques and best practices.

Regardless of whether you’re speaking to strategic decision-making in behavioral or case questions, your interviewer is looking for three things:

• Do you know how to clarify and structure a question, distilling the question to its essence?
• Do you have the business knowledge and acumen to quickly prioritize what to think about?
• Do you have the stakeholder awareness to take a process that yields not just a theoretical answer but rather a realistic, practical outcome that the team can take and operationalize?

Answering Strategic Decision-Making Questions

To demonstrate the skills above in common case / behavioral questions, we recommend the following flow:

Clarify the problem

First, understand the problem context in terms of business goals, urgency, resources available, cross-functional partnerships required, and external environmental considerations.

Align on guiding principles

It's critical to define why the decision matters before jumping ahead to potential solutions. Taking the time upfront to define both primary and secondary goals and how success / failure will affect greater business priorities will help you make better decisions down the road. Secondarily, getting alignment on guiding principles makes stakeholder management much easier because it'll be easy to communicate why this work matters to all involved.

Establish an option set

Only now should you move on to options.

Tip: Doing company research upfront will be invaluable for case interview questions at this stage -- understanding your target company's business priorities and the competitive environment they operate in will make establishing a realistic set of options and down-selecting much easier.

Also talk through how you'd go about answering the questions that come up when establishing and prioritizing options. Include data considerations, stakeholder issues, and anything relevant related to competition.

Finally, be sure to continuously tie your assessment of opportunities back to your business problem and guiding principles.

This is a lot packed in here, so we’ll tackle each of them one-by-one.