““Candidate: This is a pretty broad problem, so I’d like to start with an arbitrary hypothesis. Because the client wants both sales and profits to increase, let’s hypothesize that the client has a sales growth problem. To test that hypothesis, I’d like to break down the client’s profits into its component parts: sales and costs. Specifically, I’d like to understand how each has changed in the past three years, because we know that’s the duration in which sales and profits have remained flat.””
