Case Interviews
How would you structure a case about building a new city?
How would you approach a case where the client wants to build a new city, attract people to live there, and estimate the population after a few years? I'm less interested in the exact answer than in how to structure such an unusual problem.
Ian’s Answer
Wow, this is a lot!
What you need to remember here, is it's not about the answer. There are a million answers. What it's about is how you structure your thinking.
That being said, here's a quick example:
Objective: Getting people to live in the city
Understand current needs in market What do people want? Space? Amenities? Cars? Public Transport? etc.
Prioritize needs
Figure out the most important needs. First, identify table stakes needs. Then make sure you address these no matter what.
Second, for non-table-stakes items, rank them. Figure out which ones, have the most "elasticity" I.e. for every extra dollar, how many more people do we get? Rank these
Identify pairings/synergies Expand upon step 2 by figuring out what things can be done together. I.e. if we find out green + space + public transport is important, then, obviously, we can kill 3 birds with 1 stone (i.e. over-index on bikes, trams, etc. and limit options for cars). For these pairings, identify new dollar-per-citizen benefit
Set constraints and optimize Figure out
How much $ we have and
What we're willing to spend per person. From here, we can figure out the top designs we can afford, to what degree, and build out the city from there.
Market sizing
In order to figure out the # of people, you can literally just take what we selected from $2/3 (in terms of rate) and multiple by how much we're spending on each of them to get toal population. That's the beauty of this structure...you've done two-in-one :)