I finished my interview in the afternoon and got notified the next day that I'd passed. But my next round wasn't a PD round — it was another case interview instead. I don't know if any of the intern applicants here can confirm whether this is the standard process for everyone.
For the mini case, the interviewer introduced themselves and then we got started. It was the grocery loyalty membership card case that I'd seen posted on the forum before.
- The first question was how to evaluate profit.
- The second question had me actually calculate the profit. This one matched what I'd seen on the forum, but I'd read it before and completely forgot the numbers, so I worked it out by hand on the spot. You could ask questions along the way and the interviewer would pretty much answer anything I asked. I calculated that it was a loss.
- The third question was about adding a premium membership — how to approach it using breakeven analysis.
- The fourth question was that the database had gone down for three months, and some premium users never got registered as a result — calculate how much was lost, paying attention to the details. One detail I picked up on: over the three months, 6,000 users total never got registered, so when calculating the loss I assumed 2,000 of them missed three months of premium fees, 2,000 missed two months, and 2,000 missed one month. I said this assumption out loud and the interviewer said it made sense.
- The fifth question was different from anything I'd seen on the forum — I was hearing it for the first time. It was a follow-up to the previous question: given that the database was down for three months, what would you do to prevent this from happening again and reduce the losses? I talked about setting up key database metrics, dashboard visualization, and setting up alerts.
After the case was done, they had me give a self-introduction, asked why Capital One, and then it was Q&A. The interviewer was pretty nice.
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