i used to freeze on market sizing prompts until a few veterans in this group tore apart my assumptions and forced me to simplify. out of those mock roasts i built a 5-step playbook i actually use in interviews: clarify scope, pick top-down vs bottom-up, define 1–2 core assumptions, do a quick sanity check, and state your rounding & confidence. practicing each step with timed feedback made the whole flow repeatable under stress. curious — which step would you want a concrete worked example for?
i’ve seen a hundred ‘5-step’ playbooks that fall apart in real mocks. the steps aren’t magic — it’s the discipline behind them. pick one anchor assumption, show a sanity check, and speak your rounding out loud. interviewers want defensible numbers, not poetry. if you keep defending fuzzy multipliers you’ll get nudged off track. stop memorizing flows and start arguing the math.
want brutal yet helpful feedback? do a mock, ask the vet to call out your weak assumptions, then redo the same case with those fixes. i’ve watched people improve tenfold after one roast; the pain sticks. also, stop using unnecessary decimals — it signals uncertainty hidden as precision. fix that and you’ll look confident, not clueless.
i tried the 5 steps last night. clarifying scope first saved me so much time. i still mess up when picking top-down vs bottom-up tho. any tips for choosing quickly?
this post is gold — how long did it take you to feel fluent with the playbook? i'm doing 15min drills but feel slow.
this is awesome — small drills + blunt feedback = huge gains. keep at it, you’ll see progress fast!
i remember my first real mock with a former banker who didn’t sugarcoat anything. he asked two simple questions and then told me to re-run the estimate without one of my multipliers. felt humiliating at first, but after doing that three times i started catching my own lazy assumptions mid-answer. now in interviews i actually say ‘i’ll assume X’ and it calms me — less rambling, more math. honestly, those first awkward sessions changed my whole approach.
From practice sessions I’ve run, candidates who state a single anchor assumption and perform a one-step sanity check finish their sizing 30–40% faster and receive higher interviewer clarity ratings. A practical template: 1) define scope (population or revenue), 2) choose approach, 3) set anchor (e.g., penetration, ARPU), 4) compute, 5) sanity-check against an independent macro (census, GDP share). Track your time per step over ten drills and aim to reduce execution variance by half.