20 Case Interview Questions to Practice (With Structure Hints)

How to use these case interview questions

These 20 case interview questions are original practice prompts with fictional companies, grouped into eight types. Each comes with a one-line structure hint. Read the prompt, take one or two minutes to build your own structure, and only then look at the hint.

Work in pairs. The person playing the interviewer reads the prompt aloud, answers clarifying questions, invents reasonable data when the candidate asks for it and steers toward a recommendation within 25-30 minutes. When I coached groups, I asked the interviewer to decide the "true" answer in advance, which makes the data consistent and the feedback sharper.

For the method behind the hints, see the complete case interview guide. For a schedule, use the 6-week preparation plan.

Profitability cases

Profitability cases ask why profit fell or how to raise it. Start with revenue and costs, then find the segment where the change concentrates.

1. Harbor Lane Bakeries, a chain of 140 bakery cafes in the US Midwest, saw operating profit fall 30% in two years while store count stayed constant. What is driving the decline? Hint: split revenue into traffic and average ticket per store, costs into ingredients, labor and rent, then compare by store age.
2. Nordvik Ferries runs four routes in Norway. Revenue grew 8% last year, yet profit fell. The CEO wants to know why. Hint: check revenue and cost per route; growth on a low-margin route can lower total profit.
3. Quillmark, a mid-sized publisher of school textbooks, faces a 20% profit drop as schools shift to digital material. How should it respond? Hint: separate print and digital economics, then size how fast the mix shifts.

Market entry cases

Market entry cases ask whether and how a client should enter a new market. Cover market attractiveness, competition, the client's ability to win and the entry economics.

4. Altavera Foods, a Spanish maker of chilled gazpacho, is considering entering the UK supermarket channel. Should it? Hint: size the UK chilled soup segment, map retailer and competitor power, then test the break-even volume.
5. Brightloop, a US provider of home EV chargers, wants to enter Germany. What entry mode would you recommend? Hint: compare build, partner and acquire on speed, cost, control and risk.
6. Tamsin Health, a private clinic operator in Singapore, is evaluating expansion into dermatology services. Is it worth it? Hint: assess demand, required doctors and equipment, cannibalization of current services and payback period.

M&A cases

M&A cases ask whether a buyer should acquire a target. Judge the target on its own, the synergies, the price and the risks.

7. Corvane Capital, a private equity fund, is offered a chain of 60 self-service car washes for $180M. Should it buy? Hint: value the standalone cash flows, test the growth assumptions, then add an exit view after five years.
8. Pellham Tools, a power tool maker, is considering buying a struggling battery startup to secure supply. What would you advise? Hint: weigh supply security and technology against integration risk and alternatives such as a long-term contract.

Pricing cases

Pricing cases ask what a product should cost. Triangulate between cost, competitor prices and value to the customer.

9. Vireo Diagnostics has developed a field test that detects crop disease in 20 minutes. How should it price the kit for farmers? Hint: quantify the value of an avoided crop loss per hectare, then set price as a share of that value above unit cost.
10. Stellan Air, a regional airline, wants to introduce a paid seat-selection fee. What fee would you set? Hint: segment passengers by willingness to pay, estimate uptake at three price points and check the reaction of competitors.

Growth cases

Growth cases ask how to restart or accelerate revenue. Separate existing customers, new customers, new products and new markets.

11. Lumio, a B2B software company selling scheduling tools to dental practices, saw growth slow from 25% to 6%. How can it grow again? Hint: split growth into new logos, expansion and churn, then check which lever stalled.
12. Copperfield Cycles, a premium bike brand, wants to double revenue in five years. Is that realistic and how? Hint: list core growth, adjacent products such as e-bikes and service, and new geographies; size each against the target.

Operations cases

Operations cases ask why a process underperforms. Map the process, find the bottleneck and quantify the gap.

13. Ostrander Logistics runs a warehouse that ships 18% fewer orders per worker than its sister sites. What should management do? Hint: map receive, store, pick, pack, ship; compare throughput per step to find the bottleneck.
14. Marlow General Hospital has an emergency department where average wait times rose from 2 to 4 hours. How can it bring them down? Hint: separate patient arrivals, triage, treatment and discharge, then look at staffing by hour against demand by hour.
15. Fenwick Beverages has a bottling line running at 62% of rated capacity. Where is the lost output? Hint: break losses into downtime, speed losses and quality rejects.

Market sizing cases

Market sizing cases ask for a defensible estimate. Choose a top-down or bottom-up approach, state assumptions and sanity-check the result.

16. How many padel rackets are sold in Spain each year? Hint: players by intensity segment times replacement rate, plus new players.
17. What is the annual revenue of all dog grooming salons in Germany? Hint: dogs, share groomed professionally, visits per year, price per visit.
18. How many electric scooters does a city of 1 million people need for a shared fleet? Hint: trips per day from commuters and visitors, trips per scooter per day, plus a buffer for charging and repairs.

My case interview math guide covers the arithmetic shortcuts these prompts need.

Public sector cases

Public sector cases ask how a government or nonprofit can reach a goal with a fixed budget. Define the objective first, since profit rarely applies.

19. The city of Westbridge wants to cut traffic deaths by 50% in five years. Where should it spend a $40M safety budget? Hint: segment fatalities by road user and location, then rank interventions by lives saved per dollar.
20. A national tax agency in a mid-sized European country loses an estimated 12% of VAT revenue to non-compliance. How should it close the gap? Hint: split the gap by business size and sector, then compare audit, digital reporting and simplification measures on cost per euro recovered.

A quick structure checklist for any prompt

Before you present a structure, run this five-point check:

1. Does the structure answer the client's actual question?
2. Are the branches MECE: no overlap, nothing major missing?
3. Is it tailored to this industry, with at least one branch a generic framework would miss?
4. Can you state a first hypothesis and the data that tests it?
5. Can you explain it top-down in under 60 seconds?

If any answer is no, refine before you speak. The most common ways candidates go wrong are listed in case interview mistakes.

Stephan's note: In group sessions, the biggest improvement came when candidates swapped roles. Writing the data for prompt 13 yourself teaches you more about operations cases than solving three of them.

Going further

Once you have run these 20 prompts, practice with full cases that include exhibits and data. My book Cracking the Case contains three fully worked candidate cases, three business-case frameworks and the four principles I use for guesstimates.