Interviewing: Frameworks - I

Now you are aware of how to prepare for and carry yourself in an interview. In this section, you will learn about a structured approach for interviewing any internal or external customer for a clear understanding of the problem.

When you are trying to solve a problem, you don’t want to leave any stone unturned. You try to gather all the relevant information; but if things are not clear in your head, you will end up with large chunks of unwanted information as well.

For example, you are interviewing a client who is troubled because of the falling market demand. If you have no clear structure in your mind, you might start with the question:

“What do you think is wrong in the company?”

Some possible answers that you will have are as follows:

• The internal processes are not optimised.
• The sales team is inefficient.
• The product is not popular because of bad quality.
• The company lacks the necessary resources.

You will end up with a list of ten random problems spanning more than five different departments. It is possible that only two of them are relevant for your analysis, but you end up gathering irrelevant information as well.

To overcome this issue, people have developed specific patterns of asking questions over the years, which we call ‘frameworks’. There are multiple frameworks available at your disposal, and you need to pick the one that is the most suitable for your case. As part of this course, you will learn about some of the popular frameworks and understand how you can apply them in different cases. Let’s begin with the frameworks then.

The video above discusses three frameworks:

• 5 WHYs
• So what?
• 5 Ws

All three frameworks are useful to understand the context of the problem. You cannot cover all the domains using these frameworks, but they give you a sense of the problem. Let's go through some details of each of them in the next segment.