Rule of 3 Framework for Strategy

K.I.S.S. - Keep it simple with strategy questions.

While the Pros vs Cons framework is a good general purpose framework for “Should X do Y?” questions, you can also take a simplier approach if crunched for time.

The Rule of Three to the rescue, yet again. If you address three simple concepts, it will help you focus on the most important concepts for most “Should X do Y” questions for most big tech firms. The three are:

1. Mission

2. Strengths

3. Scalable

For example: Should Google invest in vending machines?

Your instincts are telling you No, because:

1. Google’s Mission is to make the world’s information and usable. How does the vending machine fit into that.

2. Google excels at software engineering, it dabbles in hardware, but not the likes of vending machines.

3. Scalable - Vending machines can’t be scaled like software. In what scenario does it make sense to try and scale vending machines within Google?

And with that, you can do a quick assessment and check with the interviewer to see if they want a deeper dive, but with that you have hit on most of the reasons that your gut was telling you to say no.