Updated July 2026 · By Florian Smeritschnig, Former McKinsey Senior Consultant The 80/20 rule in consulting means roughly 80% of business impact comes from 20% of the available actions, so consultants at McKinsey, BCG, and Bain deliberately concentrate their analysis, recommendations, and client effort on the highest-impact 20% rather than analyzing everything. In practice, this…
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Updated November 2026 · By Dr. Florian Smeritschnig, former McKinsey Senior Consultant Market sizing questions ask you to estimate the size of a market, like the number of pizzas sold in the US each year, with no data and no calculator. You answer them in six steps: clarify, structure, assume, calculate, sanity-check, and interpret. Interviewers score…
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By Florian Smeritschnig, former McKinsey Senior Consultant · Updated September 2026 MECE stands for mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive. It is a way of splitting a problem into buckets that do not overlap (mutually exclusive) and that leave nothing important out (collectively exhaustive). In a case interview, a MECE structure breaks the problem into clean, complete…
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Updated July 2026. By Florian Smeritschnig, former McKinsey Senior Consultant. An online case interview is a normal consulting case interview run over video, almost always on Zoom, and the firm scores it with the exact same criteria it uses in person: your structure, your math, and how clearly you communicate. What changes is everything around…
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By Florian Smeritschnig, former McKinsey Senior Consultant · Updated September 2026 Case interview brainstorming asks you to generate ideas (usually the causes of a problem or the options to solve it) out loud, and it tests structured creativity: the interviewer grades whether your ideas are broad, deep, organized into MECE buckets, and insightful, not how…
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Florian spent five years at McKinsey as a Senior Consultant and is a highly experienced consulting interviewer and problem-solving coach. Having conducted interviews with hundreds of candidates, he understands exactly what top-tier firms look for in successful applicants.
He founded StrategyCase.com to make top consulting careers more accessible by providing tailored, up-to-date insights into the recruiting process. Recognized as the most successful case and fit interview coach, Florian has helped his clients secure 700+ offers at MBB, Tier-2 firms, Big 4 consulting divisions, in-house consultancies, and boutique firms over the past four years.
He is the author of “The 1%: Conquer Your Consulting Case Interview,” “The 1%: Case Interview Workbook,” and “Consulting Career Secrets”, all available on Amazon.
