CASE INTERVIEW WITH FORMER MCKINSEY INTERVIEWER: CANADIAN WILDLIFE FEDERATION

hi there i'm mike ross i'm part of the team here at case coach and i'm a former consultant and interviewer from mckinsey i'm going to be doing some case interview videos and these are going to be replications of cases that look a lot like the types of cases that you will see in interviews for consulting firms around the world throughout the interviews i'll be interjecting some comments or thoughts as we go things that went really well and other things that can be improved enjoy the videos welcome to the firm thank you thank you for having me all right so uh we're just going to start off with the case why don't i just launch into the prompt yeah absolutely so your client in this case is the canadian wildlife federation otherwise known as the cwf this is a government-affiliated non-profit organization which aims to educate canadians about wildlife and promote responsible human actions and conservation they've contacted your firm to help them figure out why one particular endangered species population the swift fox has been declining dramatically and what they can do to stop it from declining any further interesting that's too bad for the swift fox yeah yeah it sounds like a pretty dramatic decline in their population oh yeah well that's really too bad so my question for you scott is how would you think about solving this problem great um before before we dive too far into how we want to think about solving this i just want to make sure i've captured everything and clarify a couple points before yeah of course before we go too much further of course so as i heard it i'm here today dealing with the canadian wildlife federation and they've been struggling with a declining population of the swift fox and really we're just here to answer what's been causing this decline in this fox population that's right okay great um so just to set a bit more context talking about the swift foxes how how long has this decline been going on and how much of or how much the population has actually been lost yeah no it's a fair question so actually it looks like historically the populations have been stable up until the last year so it's really a very recent decline oh wow interesting um that's very interesting do we have any numbers as to how much has this declined or anything like that so what i've got is that uh we have 5 000 today okay and a year ago is 6 000. oh wow okay that's a pretty meaningful decline yeah 15 17 um let's talk about objectives a little bit before we get too far into this as well is there any uh sort of target level they're wanting to get the population back to or time window we're looking to achieve this in i mean this is less about targets sort of what are we going to achieve and more but let's just do what we can to address this decline right so i don't think they have a target number in mind okay but as soon as possible let's understand what's going on and then we can move to figuring out how to address it okay okay so this is more of a diagnostic exercise than uh let's get to a risk exactly okay great um i think i've got all i need for right now do you mind if i just take a quick minute here and structure out my thoughts perfect please do how are we doing scott doing just great so let me share with you how i'm thinking about this so the way i see it is that in order to answer what's been causing this decline in fox population it's a matter of a formula of three key things births deaths and what i'm calling departures okay so within births i really just want to look at how many foxes are being born year to year and how has that changed has there been a decline in the number of foxes being born every year or has that been stable and then the other side of it is the death so this is the subtraction from the population um and this i'd really look at it in in three categories so deaths natural deaths so those associated with just age and other factors like that disease related which i mean it's self-explanatory how many deaths are related to disease and has there been a change in that in the last year so yeah and the final death-related death bucket would be hunting so sort of the human the human element sure of course how many foxes are being hunted every year if that's a factor at all my sense is that they're endangered so that's probably not an issue and then the last one is departures so thinking about maybe humans have forced them out of their natural habitat and it forced them somewhere else they're not necessarily declining in total numbers they're just declining in the region that we're looking at so it's more than our counting of the ones that are around rather than what they're actually declining in terms of deaths or exactly as much exactly um that seems like a pretty complete list scott is there anything in particular in that you would focus on yeah so for me the the place i'd want to start actually is looking at deaths my my thinking here is around the disease or the hunting component hunting maybe less so but i think i want to focus first on disease especially given the time frame of this being just one year and try to understand if there's been some new disease that's cropped up or any other factor that's caused an uptick in the number of deaths all right so let's talk a little bit about how scott did right there he just shared his initial structure and i think he did a great job first he did a great job starting with clarifying questions he didn't spend too long reiterating what the case prompt was or what the brief of the question was he though he checked to make sure that he had the right target he wanted to make sure that he was aligned and he diagnosed the root cause before moving towards solutions got me to interview sorry got me to agree with his approach and then went into it right and that's exactly what you want to do right that first beginning part of the case right make sure you're on the right path don't spend too much time there and then launch into it yes he could have asked a couple more questions about the swift fox does it have an unusual habitat or characteristics is it an endangered species since it's the focus of this case maybe a little bit more information on it could have been useful right it's just a made-up thing and so there may be some other interesting nuggets there that he could have dug in a little bit on but this is not to say that it wasn't a great start once he got into his structure i thought he did a very good job the structure is clearly mesi right it's an equation that gets us very clearly to population growth birth minus deaths minus net migration he's focused on the right metric he's not just making up some framework for no particular reason it's very targeted to what it is we're trying to achieve and he provided great insight there around hunting and migration okay perfect let's jump into it let's do it okay so let's talk first about the diseases so in the past year or two years has there been any meaningful disease that's appeared in the swiftbox population that something we should know about you know the one thing that i see is that there is this deadly gastrointestinal disease that affected a bunch of forests of canada including the habitat at swift fox oh interesting now we don't have any data or any information as to whether or not that's affecting the swift fox in particular okay but that type of animal seems like has been suffering from this thing okay interesting interesting um well you mentioned that we didn't have any specific data pertaining to that so i'll just leave it there as sort of a placeholder something interesting to keep in mind um so still along the the deaths the increase in deaths the other factor is the natural deaths and i'm just curious about the life expectancy of fox and if there's been any meaningful change in that in the recent history you know from what we see we don't really see any real difference in life expectancy in terms of what has changed in the last little while not really now okay so no real change so with that in mind it it feels to me a little bit like deaths is not the avenue that we're going to find too much useful information on at least at this point uh so i think it's time to maybe pivot to another piece of this which is talking about the number of births every year so let's talk about burst for a little bit if that's okay with you so i'm curious how many how many foxes uh excuse me how many foxes are born every year or how many um pups can be born to a female in their lifetime uh that's a good question let me see what the facts have here so the way that they measure these are in litters okay so the average fox litter is one and a half boxes okay and that's a once yearly thing once yearly yeah okay interesting interesting and that's um per female obviously um that seems like a lot of foxes my goodness um okay so that gives a sense of how many foxes can potentially be born and i guess the the way to sort of quantify that is to think about how many females there are in this population given that another one that can be born so my assumption is that of this 5 000 population and half are females is that is that a fair assumption yeah that's fair although we have actually some data that i can show you oh okay let me show you a couple of exhibits okay i'd love to hear what you have to say or what you see there oh interesting okay do you mind if i just take a quick second just sure sure don't take too long because i'd like to get kind of your first impressions early on yeah absolutely okay so what i what i'm seeing here is that uh basically the poc the fox population is broken into four regions split by this highway but the the populations aren't split equally and it seems like there's actually a very unbalanced uh gender well there's the genders are not balanced could lead to fewer births and the other piece that i'm noticing is the instance the percentage of population that's affected by disease some of them are quite meaningful however i at first glance i don't see a real correlation with the male female or even the size of the population but this is still probably a meaningful number in terms of how many foxes are being or dying too young yeah but what this is really telling me at first is there's not enough uh there aren't enough pairs or mating pairs to be able to potentially replace all the foxes that need to be replaced yep um and also the the split in population by this highway might mean that migration between to help find a mate is also not possible because they would have to cross a highway yeah there seemed to be some pretty big skews between the female and male population yeah absolutely absolutely you know just at first glance without diving into too much detail it seems like uh there's almost like a 60 40 or 65 35 type split between females versus males it's quite interesting what do you think might be causing that that's interesting you know i why would there be more females than males um my instinct would be to say that it's sort of caused by one of two things one being this disease is affecting females more extremely affecting males more than females and the other would be some other human related factor like females or excuse me males are being hunted for some other specific reason or more a prey of some other animal so some other imbalance there however the my first hypothesis about the diseases doesn't seem to hold much merit given the correlation between the percentage of females and percent of the population affected by disease doesn't quite yeah it doesn't seem to be a clear line yeah um so my hunch is more along the lines of some sort of human interference um but that's just what would affect the the population skew and i think it's it's important that we tie this back to what we're initially trying to figure out is what's been causing this decline so where i really want to take this next i think is to look at how many going back to my initial structure here thinking about how many babies are born every year minus how many are dying by natural causes and disease which looks impactful yep and then i can probably remove this departure and then from this we can probably get a good estimate as to how much we expect our population to change yeah oh in the next year or the years following yep does that make sense to you sure yeah and actually i mean this lines up pretty well with what the client's interested in knowing okay great all right so me again just interrupt let's talk a little bit about judgment and insights right so he's progressing through the case i'm giving him lots of leeway to choose where to focus and he's doing a great job of leading the way right that interviewee-led approach when we did exhibits right i shared these with scott he did a very good job of drawing the insights out of them commented on what he saw high level without getting lost in the details and then focused only on the aspects that could help him solve the case right there's sometimes quite a lot of noise around scott was very good at targeting into the things that were really really important using this he came up with a few hypotheses that suggested he would quantify their impact in the next step so he's had he kind of said oh here's a couple of hypothesis we're going to get to quantification he's driving me through the case rather than forcing me to drive him through the case overall i think he's doing a great job and so what they've asked is that they said you know they're intrigued by what it is you're finding in these exhibits and they're really curious how impactful both the disease and gender disparity have been on the overall population most specifically what they're interested in knowing is how much would you expect the population to decline based on these two issues in the next year okay so basically the way i'm thinking about this is taking it right back to my initial structure but quantifying it right so starting first with the number of births that we see every year minus the number of deaths by natural land disease yep so within burst the way i'm thinking about it is looking at how many mating pairs can possibly there possibly can exist which is based on the fraction of the population yep and uh i'll call it the the limiting gender so which everyone has a smaller percentage and then going back to the how many cubs they can have in a single litter so that'll give us the number of births we can expect a year and then to the death side it's basically just a sum of how many natural deaths we would expect based on their life expectancy and then the disease which is again based on the life expectancy by those infected um so maybe let's start first with births and there's a couple pieces of information that i'm going to ask you for before we start calculating things so um you mentioned before that the each female fox can expect to have one and a half cubs or one and a half pups per per year yeah i don't know what the terminology is but yes you're right that's an a so mating season is once a year okay but pairs only mate once every five years okay interesting interesting so that's one and a half pups every five years that's right interesting okay and a swift fox will choose like one made for life really okay okay that's that's important as well and their life expectancy is ten years okay okay so all this stuff will be extremely helpful to help me calculate this but actually the first thing i need to do is to figure out how many mating pairs there are every year so i'm going to go back to this table and start putting some numbers to it before we jump into that just thinking back to your original structure yeah you had this migration question there yeah where are you on that what is your thinking well my thinking is that this uh just looking at this exhibit here migration might be a lot more limited in the the highway splitting these two groups yep um but you're right that's a good that's a good push that maybe it's something that we're missing here is is let's bring that back into this equation and see if it's impactful no i think it i mean i actually think it's fair for you to assume that there's a zero there right i just want to make sure that we're not losing that in the equation because maybe we'll come across some facts but based on what we understand so far there's nothing to worry about okay great great great so i'm going to leave that out of the formula and we'll keep going on with this so let's let's first figure out how many mating pairs there per year so we know that group a b c d group a has quarter of the population our population is 5 000. that's right right so our population uh total population there is 1250 and then we care about the limiting the limiting population for mating pairs which is 10 of the males which means we can only have 125 mating pairs every year right oh i see what you're doing yes that makes a lot of sense okay great um so let me just sum these all up and we'll keep going so the next population is group b eighth of our population so that's going to be 625. is that right sorry let me just take a second here 625 is correct and our limiting population again is the male 1 30 of this so that's about 100 and i'll call it 190 is that okay with you yeah that's fine okay i can't even go 200 it works for me sure let's do that make my life a little bit easier yeah the next population is 3 8 3 of this so 1875. and well population is evenly split so we can have half that number 80 pairs so that's uh 937 so let's uh let's call 940 sure and our last group group d another quarter so 1250 and our limiting population is the males again which brings us to four times that is 500 so this is the total number of mating pairs that we have per year and we can tie this back into our formula to get how many pups that would be in a single year so 125 200 so 325 8 plus 500 be 825 plus another 940 is 1765. so that's how many mating pairs we can have in a year yep and let's bring it back to our original formula page because it's getting a little messy so we have 700 1765 mating pairs you said that there was one and a half cubs per pair and they made once every five years so this is over five right so um let me make my life a little bit easier here and i'll call it 1765 divided by a times point three excuse me where is just one point five divided by five perfect okay okay um and then that just means thirty percent of this do you mind if i round this to eighteen hundred yeah that's five so that's 180 times 3 which is 300 plus another 240. so 540. so that's how many pups we can expect to be born every year okay so that's one side of our equation now let's get the other side which is deaths so the first piece we talked about was natural and you gave me a piece of information saying that life expectancy was 10 years which is perfect so we know that of our oh you know what i was just about to skip a step here but i'm realizing that we need to we need to segment out these ones so let me go back here and make sure i separate out those affected by disease so let's go back to this percentage here i'll make this disease so 25 of our quarter which was 12.50 so a quarter of um 1250 would be about 400 excuse me 315 ish so what are you trying to do now you're trying to carve out the effect of disease on the birth population is that right no i'm actually thinking about this from the death perspective so my assumption is that those disease can still mate but the the issue here is that those diseased uh have a shorter life expectancy or my guess is that they have a shorter life expectancy which is actually some piece of information that i haven't got from you yet so i'll probably ask you that now so disease yes is there what's the impact on their life expectancy or kills in a year a year okay so that's important so it's a good thing that i was starting to do this because we're going to need this information anyway so what i'm doing here is figuring out how many are diseased yes subtract them from the whole population yeah because they won't they won't be affected by this 10-year life expectancy that's right like the remainder of the un-diseased body that's right so let me continue on with this so the next population is group b which is an eighth of 625 and it's 40 percent are diseased um let's call this 63 again so 40 of that is 240 252. say 250 is fine okay so 250 are diseased group c 1875. ten percent of disease that makes my life easy call it 188. and the last one is five percent of this 1250 which means 125 so 60 62.5 let's make that a little rounder only let me just make it 62 and it'll make my life easier yeah sure so this is uh 565 plus another 190 and 62.50 so that's 7 8 15 is the number that are diseased okay so that means just from disease alone we're going to be losing 850 per year yeah 815 per year let me just start this sum here so births deaths i'll call this natural and diseased that's good so births we have 540 yep diseased we have 815 which is quite meaningful uh in natural we have the remainder of this 5000 less than 15 which is 41.95 excuse me 41.85 and 10-year life expectancy so that means assuming that it's an even population distribution that's fair that we're going to lose about 420 of those every year so let's bring this all together here so what we're doing here is just summing the rest of this to see our population changing so 540 births less 420 natural deaths raises 220 minus another 815 which would be uh minus 120 so that would be 7 695. 6.95 and that's a negative population decline yes so what this is telling me is that on our 5 000 we're losing 695 a year yeah about 700 that's about 14 of our entire population just in a single year but more importantly is that we're having more disease related deaths than we are births and actually the births could cover natural deaths if we if disease didn't exist right and we'd actually be recovering a little bit right right so what my next steps would be to look at the causes of this disease and if any um cures exist out there that we could look at and start thinking about how we can implement these cures to try and reduce the number of disease but on the other side we could also look at boosting the number of births because we saw before that there's a gender imbalance there might be an opportunity to either try and rebalance the population between these groups by physically moving them around or potentially introducing other vox population from uh that are bred outside of this environment just to try and boost the burst numbers try and you know maybe grow the population a little quicker yeah so that's the way i would think about this okay now let's talk about the number stuff the math stuff another top-notch answer from scott right his approach is high level calculations are confident and error-free he's not making any mistakes as you're going that's fantastic at the end and perhaps most important to this right in the math don't forget this at the end he shared the far-reaching implications of his answer he didn't just leave it sit there as a number but thought about what does this mean for the case he went way back to the case prompt what does this mean for the case as a whole i know you want to hear about improvements and if i'm being picky here's a couple right scott could have perhaps structured his second level calculations as well as his first and communicated those in advance for example explaining how he would have calculated deaths before actually calculating them he did this as he went right he sort of rolled along with it but sometimes it's useful to give me the equation beforehand so i can see where it is you're going perhaps i can correct you or things like this scott almost missed right he almost forgot to take diseases into account in that calculation caught himself so no harm done but by explaining it ahead of time you're more likely to give yourself a chance to catch those mistakes before you make them but overall another great answer from scott are there any further analyses you'd want to do is there anything more you'd want to look at if you had a little bit more time on the project i mean absolutely um the the biggest element is the disease we talked about just briefly right now but all we know about it right now is that it's gastrointestinal so i'd be really interested to look at if there are other populations that have been affected by this disease and if they were able to eradicate it just to really identify what we could potentially be doing for responses but that's just on one side of it the other piece is on the burst which we just talked about in a little bit more detail right now so i mean there is a lot more analysis i'd like to do on that yeah but yeah that's where i sort of want to take this next maybe there's also like a general benchmarking against with fox populations in other countries right it's a great point maybe i don't know what the comparable countries what convertible countries do you think there will be with swift foxes um i guess for canadian wildlife federation so my instinct is to think uh you know an environment that looks the same something like the u.s might have parks with similar swiftbox populations or maybe some european countries something like that um but that's just looking directly at swift fox it might be interesting also to look at populations of other species maybe similar maybe not that were affected by a similar disease just to see if they were able to correct the situation and if so how just to give us some ideas cool well and as you're doing this this analysis actually the uh turns out that the chairman of the canadian wildlife federation has an upcoming public statement oh wow i'd like to include a few pieces of insight that you've generated from the work that you've done to update the local communities on the plans to save the swift fox okay great she's asked you to provide a sort of a 30-second synopsis of your key findings okay so she can share those in her public statement what would you suggest you say okay great well firstly we set out just to identify what the cause of this was and what we found is that it's a combination of too few births and too many deaths related to disease so my recommendations are two things first is to investigate the causes of these diseases and search for solutions of how to correct it in the long run and the second is to look at means of increasing the number of births we saw that births are actually about 250 less than the number of disease-related deaths and we'll never be able to recover the population in this in this manner so my next steps are investigating further the the root cause of these these diseases potential cures potential implementation plans of how we could roll out this cure and the second piece would be related to the burst to investigate further um how you can potentially rebalance the gender imbalance that exists in this environment right now all right so scott just wrapped up the case and overall very very strong all the way through the end a couple of little places for improvement here the good he stated the two main root causes of the population decline and laid out clear ways to address these right he's very much focused on the answer to the case in terms of improvement well he missed the sharing that the swift fox population is expected to climb a further 14 this year which was his top finding and perhaps missed the insight about the gender imbalance until the end of his conclusion right could have presented that a little bit earlier on these are tweaks they're not huge things at the end of a very strong case not a big deal scott throughout stands out here in terms of his case leadership he had a clear view throughout about how to solve the problem i felt in good hands i felt that he had a command of the interview he connected every insight back up to the question at hand right back up to the overall brief of the case he had specific suggestions about next steps and really one of the best that i've ever seen in terms of that dimension in terms of that kind of taking it to the not just what's happening but what should we do about it level his presence and communication are both excellent scott is articulate and concise he understands the power of synthesis he's using the right words to express what he wants to say efficiently as he goes through he's confident and engaging he's not smiling too much but he's clearly enjoying what he's doing and is moving through the case and again owning that case process he's driving me through the case he'd be great with clients right he's showing that client ability those client hands are there to me scott's a clear hire no question and a textbook example of what a great case interview can look like all right well that's it for this case thank you very much for watching i hope that you enjoyed it i hope that you found it useful if you did wow why not give a little click on that like button down below add in some comments tell us what you think there's lots more videos to check out on our platform www.casecoach.com but also here on our youtube channel enjoy and good luck with your practice

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Keywords: case study, casecoach, mckinsey style case, case interview, case interview example, mckinsey case interview, management consulting, best case interview example, consultancy, mckinsey, bain, bcg, mbb, consulting study example, case practice example, consulting interview, associate, vocaprep, preplounge, victor cheng, consulting interview example, management consulting prep, mckinsey interviews, bain interviews, bcg interviews, case interview questions and answers, Case, Mckinsey

Id: dlozAlvJTls

Length: 29min 42sec (1782 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 31 2020