Concept guides.
Interactive tutorials on the ideas behind the questions. Every guide is free with an account.
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AI, data & design
Entry · Mid · Senior- Accessibility basics: keyboard, contrast, announceThe accessibility checks interviewers probe for: full keyboard operability with a sane focus order, what a screen reader actually announces, never en…
- Catching AI's confident mistakesHow to verify AI output without re-doing the work: triage what to check first (names, numbers, dates, quotes, citations — the checkable claims), reco…
- Debugging as hypothesis testingThe method behind every 'walk me through your investigation' answer: reproduce first, ask what changed, form a hypothesis that a cheap probe can fals…
- Describing your own practiceSome questions ask what your practice IS, not for a story about one time it went well - "what does your setup actually look like", "which tools have…
- Every screen has six statesThe state grid behind every flow-design answer: empty, loading, partial, success, error, offline — plus error-message anatomy (what happened, why, wh…
Business & analytical
Entry · Mid · Senior- A/B test design: hypothesis, randomization, primary metricTurning 'make the homepage better' into a runnable experiment: a falsifiable hypothesis (change X moves metric Y by Z for population P), random assig…
- Fermi estimation: decompose, anchor, sanity-checkThe four-step Fermi method: break the unknown into factors you can anchor (population, frequency, price), multiply through, round to one significant…
- Funnel metrics and conversion decompositionOverall conversion is a product of stage rates: visit → sign-up → activation → paid
- Market sizing: top-down vs bottom-upTwo independent routes to a market number: top-down (population × penetration × spend) and bottom-up (units × usage × price), and why running both an…
- Metric anomaly triage: real move or artifact?The first-hour checklist before believing any metric move: normal variance and seasonality (was it a holiday? within 2σ?), then instrumentation (trac…
Education & teaching
Entry · Mid- Backward design: objective, evidence, then activitiesWiggins & McTighe's backward design: write a Bloom's-verb objective describing what students will do by the end, decide what evidence (formative and…
- Checking for understanding — and acting on itFast formative checks that beat 'does everyone get it?' — cold call, whiteboards, think-pair-share, exit tickets — and the decision rule afterward: m…
- De-escalation in the momentThe escalation curve (trigger, agitation, peak, recovery) and the moves that lower the temperature: calm voice, space, removing the audience, naming…
- I do, we do, you do: the lesson arcThe gradual-release arc — model with a worked example, practice together, release to independent work — plus chunking to manage cognitive load, and w…
- Openings that earn attentionHow to design the first three minutes of a lesson: hook types (puzzling case, prediction, relevance bridge, cold artifact), why 'today we will learn'…
Healthcare & clinical
Entry · Mid · Senior- Aviate, navigate, communicate: task priority in an emergencyThe aviate-navigate-communicate hierarchy for emergencies: fly the aircraft first, establish where you're going second, and only then talk — plus how…
- Confidentiality and its limitsConfidentiality is the default, with defined exits: disclosure with patient consent, mandated public-health and safety reporting, imminent risk to se…
- Hypothesis-driven history and the differentialHow clinicians build a differential diagnosis: generate hypotheses early from the presenting complaint, then ask history questions that discriminate…
- Informed consent: the elements that make it validThe elements of valid consent — disclosure of nature, material risks, benefits, and alternatives (including doing nothing), decision-making capacity,…
- Memory items and QRH checklist disciplineHow emergency procedures split into immediate-recall memory items and read-do QRH checklists: confirm you're on the right checklist, run challenge-re…
Legal & policy
Entry · Mid · Senior- BLUF: the one-page decision briefBottom line up front: the recommendation and the ask live in the first sentence, then a fixed skeleton — two lines of context, three evidence-backed…
- Issue-spotting sweep: parties, duties, breaches, remediesThe systematic sweep behind IRAC: list every party and relationship, ask what duty each owed (contract, tort, statute, fiduciary), where it was breac…
- Stakeholder mapping: who's affected, who decides, who fightsA systematic stakeholder enumeration — targets, implementers, funders, enforcers, and the adjacent winners and losers people forget — placed on a pow…
- Translating for non-experts: plain-language summariesHow to turn a dense clause or technical finding into something a busy non-expert can act on: lead with what it means for the reader, swap abstraction…
- Comparing policy options with a criteria matrixThe core policy-shop move: generate genuinely different options — status quo, tax vs ban vs subsidy vs mandate vs disclosure, narrower targeting — th…
Marketing & sales
Entry · Mid- Campaign brief anatomy: audience, insight, message, measurementThe four load-bearing slots of a brief — a sharply defined audience segment, the human insight underneath, one single-minded message, and how success…
- Closed loops and shared mental modelsClosed-loop communication — command, readback, hearback — plus standard callouts, briefings, and explicit transfer of controls as the machinery that…
- Discovery questions that ladder to impactSPIN-style laddering — situation, problem, implication, need-payoff — using open-ended questions that climb from symptom to quantified business impac…
- Positioning statements and proof pointsThe classic positioning template — for (audience), who (need), our (product) is the (category) that (benefit), unlike (alternative) — and pairing eve…
- Speaking up: graded assertiveness in the cockpitThe graded-assertiveness ladder (probe, alert, challenge, declare — PACE) and the two-challenge rule: how a junior crew member escalates a safety con…
Operations & industrial
Entry · Mid · Senior- Bottlenecks & queues: why waits explode near capacityTheory of constraints — the slowest step sets system throughput, so exploit then elevate the constraint (and expect it to move) — plus the queueing i…
- Checklists, runbooks & the pre-shift briefingWhy high-pressure operations run on written procedure: checklists catch the errors experts make under load, runbooks turn a recurring failure into a…
- Lean diagnosis: eight wastes & value-stream mapsMap the current state before changing anything: draw the value stream, classify each step as value-added vs non-value-added, spot the eight wastes (w…
- Loads, margins & factors of safetyDead, live, and environmental loads combine into the demand a structure must beat with margin: the factor of safety covers uncertainty in loads, mate…
- RevPAR & rate fences: selling the same room at many pricesRevPAR = ADR x occupancy, so rate and volume trade against each other — and yield management beats one-price by segmenting demand (business vs leisur…
People & leadership
Entry · Mid · Senior- Ending a hard call with next stepsThe last ninety seconds carry the call
- Escalating well: when to raise it and howA three-factor test for when to escalate — irreversibility, blast radius, and whether the decision is yours to own — and the mechanics of doing it wi…
- Five conflict styles and when each winsThe Thomas–Kilmann grid — competing, collaborating, compromising, avoiding, accommodating — as positions on assertiveness × cooperativeness, and matc…
- SBI: feedback that names behavior, not characterThe Situation–Behavior–Impact structure: anchor feedback to a specific moment, describe observable behavior instead of traits, state the impact you s…
- STAR and CARL: structuring your storyThe four-beat STAR arc (Situation, Task, Action, Result) for any 'tell me about a time' question, and the CARL variant (Context, Action, Result, Lear…