Case interviews and strategy conversations lean heavily on a small set of well-known frameworks, SWOT, Porter’s five forces, the kind of tools that give structure to a messy business question. This deck introduces each one from scratch: what it is for, when it actually applies, and the trap of using it as a checklist instead of a thinking tool. If you have never used a strategy framework before, this is designed to get you comfortable enough to reach for the right one under pressure.
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Card 1 of 14
A client’s CEO tells you the company’s strategy is to grow revenue 20% next year. Your engagement manager winces. Why isn’t that actually a strategy, and what would one look like?
A goal says where you want to end up, a strategy is the set of choices about how you get there.
Growing 20% is a goal, an outcome the company wants. A strategy is the set of choices about how it intends to get there, which customers to serve, what to offer them, and just as importantly what it will deliberately not do. A quick test is whether a sensible rival could have chosen the opposite: a competitor might reasonably decide to win on service rather than on price, but no competitor would choose to shrink 20%. If a client’s strategy contains no trade-off, it’s a wish, and saying so politely is often the first real value a team adds.
Card 2 of 14
Ferrow Retail Group, a mid-size apparel chain, is trying to decide whether to expand into a new region. Before the team builds a recommendation, the engagement manager asks you to lay out where the client stands today. What framework do you reach for?
SWOT sorts a company's position into internal strengths/weaknesses and external opportunities/threats.
Start with a SWOT analysis, a simple four-box way to take stock of where a company stands before making a strategic call. Strengths and weaknesses are internal, things the client controls, like its brand or cost structure, while opportunities and threats come from the external environment, like market trends or new competitors. Laying all four out side by side helps the team surface what to build on, what to fix, what to chase, and what to defend against, before proposing any recommendation to expand.
Card 3 of 14
What does “economies of scope” mean, and how is it different from economies of scale?
Economies of scope save money by producing different products together, not just more of one.
Economies of scope are cost savings a company gets from producing multiple related products together rather than separately, for example by sharing R&D, distribution, or manufacturing capacity across product lines. It's a different lever from economies of scale, which comes from producing more of the same thing rather than a wider mix of things, worth distinguishing clearly if a case turns on which one is actually driving a client's costs.
Card 4 of 14
Bramwell & Co. is considering entering the packaged foods industry and has hired your firm to assess whether it's an attractive market to enter. What framework would you use to size up industry attractiveness, and what does it look at?
Five surrounding pressures, rivals, entrants, substitutes, and supplier/buyer power, decide how profitable an industry can be.
Reach for Porter's Five Forces, which sizes up how attractive an industry actually is based on five competitive pressures bearing in from every direction: rivalry among existing competitors, the threat of new entrants like Bramwell itself, the threat of substitute products, and the bargaining power of both suppliers and buyers. If most of these forces are strong, they squeeze margins and make the industry a tougher place to make money; if they're weak, incumbents tend to enjoy healthier profits, a call the team needs to make before recommending Bramwell enter.
Card 5 of 14
Merrowfield Bakery knows its costs are too high but can’t say where the money actually goes, or what customers are really paying for. How would a value chain help you answer both questions?
A value chain splits a company into its separate activities so you can see which ones actually add value.
A value chain cuts a company into the distinct activities it performs to get a product to a customer, from buying inputs through operations, distribution, marketing, and after-sales service, with support activities like technology and hiring running underneath all of them. For each activity you ask two things: what does it cost us, and would a customer pay more because we do it well. That separates the few steps where Merrowfield genuinely earns a premium from the ones that are just overhead, and it shows the team where a cost cut is safe and where it would quietly damage the product.
Card 6 of 14
Aldercrest Furniture, a mid-market retailer, asks your team how it should compete against both big-box discounters and boutique design brands. What are Michael Porter's three generic strategies for building a competitive advantage, and how might you frame Aldercrest's choice?
Porter's three routes to advantage: be the cheapest, be meaningfully different, or dominate a narrow niche.
A competitive advantage is something that lets a company consistently outperform its rivals over time. Porter described three generic strategies for building one: cost leadership, becoming the lowest-cost producer and competing on price; differentiation, offering something distinctly better that customers will pay a premium for; and focus, applying either of those approaches to a narrow market segment instead of the whole industry. For Aldercrest, the team would need to help the client pick a lane rather than get stuck in the middle, competing against discounters on price while boutique brands out-differentiate them.
Card 7 of 14
Your team finds that Castellan Tools earns far higher margins than its rivals. The partner asks the obvious next question: will that still be true in five years? How do you test whether an advantage lasts?
An advantage only lasts if rivals cannot cheaply copy it, buy it, or route around it.
An advantage shows up as returns above what rivals earn, but the real question is what stops those returns from being competed away. Name the specific thing producing the gap, then ask how a well funded competitor would copy it by next year. Barriers that tend to hold include a protected process, a cost position built on scale a smaller rival can’t reach, a brand customers genuinely trust, switching costs that make leaving painful, and network effects, where each extra user makes the product better for everyone else. A clever feature or a temporary price cut holds nothing, since it can be matched in a season.
Card 8 of 14
A consumer goods client, Cassidy Home Goods, sells six product lines and wants help deciding where to keep investing versus where to cut. What framework helps sort a portfolio like this into clear buckets?
The BCG matrix sorts products by growth and market share into stars, cash cows, question marks, and dogs.
The BCG matrix plots each of the client's product lines on two axes, market growth and relative market share, to sort them into four categories: stars (high growth, high share) are worth continued investment, cash cows (low growth, high share) generate steady cash with little need for reinvestment, question marks (high growth, low share) are uncertain bets that need cash to prove out, and dogs (low growth, low share) are usually candidates to divest. It gives the team a quick, defensible way to recommend where Cassidy should keep investing, hold steady, or cut loose.
Card 9 of 14
Halvers Sporting Goods tells your team it wants to grow but has no view on how. How would you lay out the full set of growth options on one page, and which one carries the most risk?
Growth is old or new products sold to old or new customers, and doing both at once is riskiest.
Ansoff’s growth matrix lays the options out on two questions: is the product one you already sell or a new one, and is the customer group one you already serve or a new one. Selling more of what you have to the customers you have, called market penetration, is the cheapest and best understood. Taking an existing product into a new market, or building a new product for existing customers, stretches Halvers in one direction each. Diversification, a new product for a new market, stretches it in both at once, which is why it fails most often and draws the hardest questions from a board.
Card 10 of 14
Denholm Coffee Roasters, a client of your firm, is weighing whether to buy its own bean farms and also open branded retail cafes. What strategic move is this, and how would you frame the options for the client?
Vertical integration means owning more of your own supply chain, upstream or downstream.
This is vertical integration, taking ownership of additional stages of your own supply chain. Backward integration would mean Denholm acquiring bean farms, moving upstream toward raw materials; forward integration would mean opening its own retail cafes, moving downstream toward the customer. Clients pursue it to control costs, secure supply, or capture margin that would otherwise go to an outside partner, though each direction comes with its own execution risk worth flagging.
Card 11 of 14
Northbay Logistics needs a same-day delivery capability it doesn’t have today. The CEO asks whether to build it, buy a company that already has it, or partner with one. How would you frame that decision?
Build when the capability is core and you have time, buy when speed matters, partner when neither holds.
Start by asking whether the capability is core, meaning it is central to why customers pick Northbay rather than something a competent outsider could do just as well. Core capabilities usually get built or bought, because owning them is what protects the advantage, while everything else is a fair candidate to partner or outsource. Then weigh time, price, and control. Building costs least per dollar but is slow and can fail outright, buying is fast and proven but carries a premium and an integration job, and partnering is quick and cheap while leaving Northbay dependent on someone whose interests can drift.
Card 12 of 14
A client’s CMO keeps calling a small new competitor “disruptive.” Your partner asks you to be precise about the word. What does disruption actually mean, and why does the distinction change the response?
Real disruption starts cheap and unimpressive at the low end, then improves until it takes the mainstream.
Used precisely, disruption describes an entrant that begins by serving customers the incumbent doesn’t much want, with something cheaper and genuinely worse on the dimensions the mainstream cares about, and then improves quickly enough to pull those mainstream customers across. That is different from a rival attacking with a better, more expensive product, which is ordinary competition. The distinction changes the recommendation, because a better product can often be met head on, while a disruptor is dangerous precisely because giving up the unprofitable low end looks like sound judgement right until the entrant catches up.
Card 13 of 14
You present a strategy the client’s leadership team fully agrees with, and a year later almost none of it has happened. What usually goes wrong between a good strategy and a real result?
Strategies fail when nobody moved the budget, the owners, or the incentives to match them.
Agreement in a room is cheap. A strategy only becomes real when money actually moves to the chosen priorities, when one named person owns each piece and is measured on it, and when the activities the company agreed to stop doing genuinely stop. Most failures trace back to one of those three: the budget stayed roughly where it was, incentives kept paying people for last year’s behavior, or the trade-off was quietly reversed the first time a large customer complained. That is why strong teams write the resource shifts and the owners into the recommendation itself, rather than leaving them for later.
Card 14 of 14
Larkmoor Instruments can double down on its premium niche or launch a cheaper line to blunt a fast-growing discounter. The partner wants your call, not another framework. Which do you pick, and what are you giving up?
Commit to the option whose downside you can survive, and say out loud what you are trading away.
Both are defensible, so the interviewer is testing whether you can commit and then name the cost honestly. A good answer holds the premium niche, on the grounds that Larkmoor’s advantage sits in things the discounter can’t cheaply copy, while a cheap line would compete on a cost base Larkmoor loses on and would teach its own customers that the brand is negotiable. What you accept is a smaller market and real exposure if the discounter’s quality improves over time, so pair the call with a trigger, a defined loss of share among mid-tier buyers, that forces the client to revisit it.
Reading is not the same as remembering. Study this deck with scheduled review so the cards come back before you forget them.