Paid case study interviews: written examples for ops, PM, sales and strategy roles

For engineers you can look at code, and for designers you can look at files. For an operations manager, a product manager or a sales lead, the actual work is harder to point to. But most of it ends up written down somewhere: the follow-up email after a discovery call, the memo explaining why a project slipped, the Slack message announcing a policy nobody will like.

That makes a short written case study one of the most realistic tests you can give for a business role. It's an old idea. The in-basket exercise, where a candidate works through a stack of memos and requests and decides what to do with each, was developed at Educational Testing Service in the 1950s and became a fixture of the management assessment centers that started at AT&T. Amazon took a similar view of writing internally: in 2004 Bezos replaced slide decks in senior meetings with written narrative memos, on the theory that bullet points let people hide weak reasoning.

You don't need a six-page memo. One page is usually enough.

The basic format

• Input: a short scenario, plus three to seven documents: emails, a data table, a call transcript or a customer complaint. Include some noise that should be ignored.
• Task: one written deliverable for a named reader, such as "a one-page update for the COO" or "the reply to this customer."
• Time: two to three hours, stated up front.
• Pay: a flat fee, paid whether or not you hire them.

The named reader matters. It turns "write something smart" into "write something useful for this person," which is the real job.

Examples by role

Operations. "It's Monday. You're back from a week off and have ten requests from legal, sales and product, all marked urgent, and capacity for three this week. Write a one-page note to the COO saying which three you're taking, which you're handing off and to whom, and how you're declining the rest." Look for a clear ranking rule, such as revenue at risk or compliance deadlines, and declines that won't burn bridges.

Product management. "Here are 60 pieces of raw customer feedback about our checkout flow. Write a one-page problem statement for the engineering lead. Name the top problems and the evidence for each. Don't propose solutions yet." Look for the discipline to separate the problem from the solution, and evidence quoted from the feedback rather than paraphrased into something vaguer.

Sales and business development. "Here's a transcript of a discovery call. The prospect named three pain points and pushed back on price. Write the follow-up email." Look for the prospect's own words reflected back, a next step that's specific, and no discount offered in the first email.

Customer success. "A large customer says they're canceling because of a bug. It's real and the fix is two weeks away. Write the reply." Look for an apology that doesn't overpromise, a workaround if there is one, and a date they can rely on.

People operations. "The company is moving from fully remote to three office days a week. Write the announcement for the company Slack and the FAQ underneath it." Look for whether they anticipate the hard questions and answer them before anyone asks.

Finance and strategy. "Here's the Q2 variance report. Marketing spend is up 20% and leads are flat. Write the note to the CFO: what's likely going on, what you'd check first, and three questions for the CMO." Look for interpretation, not just recalculating the variance.

How to score a written case study

Agree on the scoring before you read anything, and have two people score each piece separately. Five checks cover most roles:

1. The conclusion comes first. Is the recommendation in the first two sentences?
2. Written for the named reader. Would that person know what to do after one read?
3. Good use of the inputs. Did they use the right evidence and ignore the noise?
4. Stated assumptions. Where information was missing, did they say what they assumed?
5. Right tone for the channel. A Slack message, a customer email and a board memo should sound different.

Don't skip the conversation

Written work shows how someone thinks when they have time. It doesn't show how they handle being questioned on it. Selection research backs up using both: in the 2022 re-analysis by Sackett and colleagues, structured interviews and work samples were both among the strongest predictors of job performance, and they measure different things.

So follow the written case with 15 to 20 minutes of the candidate walking through their reasoning and answering follow-ups like "what if the COO says no to your top pick?" Pudding records that walkthrough with the written work, so everyone on the hiring team sees the same thing.

Time and pay

Two to three hours is plenty. If the role is senior, make the scenario more ambiguous, not longer. Pay a flat fee in the low hundreds of dollars, whatever the outcome, and pay quickly. It also helps the hiring manager: reading five one-page memos takes about half an hour, while five first-round interviews take a full afternoon.

Related reading

• How many words does each hiring step give you?
• Writing take-home examples
• Marketing take-home examples
• Our tracker of real non-engineering take-homes

Josh Priollaud

Founder @ Pudding

Josh Priollaud is the founder and CEO of Pudding, a Siligo Ventures portfolio company. Josh has worked in business development roles at Cloud9 IDE, Webgility, MuleSoft and Adobe. Before his Silicon Valley career, Josh served as an Economic Development Adviser in the Peace Corps. Josh holds an MBA from the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University and a BS in Business Administration from Portland State University. Josh has been a full stack developer (Ruby on Rails, React) since 2020.

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