Case study: a 2.1-star app with rising usage
The CFO has ten minutes and wants to know what a rebuild actually buys.
An intermediate-level session of about 10 minutes. You present a decision and take 3 rounds of questions on it.
"And what does that get us?" is the question waiting at the end of every sentence you say here, and the ten minutes go quickly. The awkward part of this brief is that the app is rated 2.1 and being used more, not less, so the simple story — users hate it, rebuild it — does not hold up on its own. You have to say what the rebuild is meant to change, and say it as something that can sit in a plan: retention, support load, cost per transaction, something countable. Expect to be stopped mid-explanation. Answer the interruption first and return to your structure afterwards, rather than finishing the point you had prepared and hoping the question goes away.
Angles worth taking
- Open with the recommendation itself; a build-up that arrives at the answer last gets interrupted before it lands.
- Name the number the rebuild is supposed to move, and say where you would expect to see it change first.
- Rising usage next to a 2.1 rating is the tension in this brief, so explain it instead of picking the convenient half.
- When you do not have a figure, say what you would measure and by when, rather than estimating on the spot.
- Offer the cheaper version you did not recommend, plus one sentence on why the fuller spend earns its cost.
Who is in the room
You play
A candidate presenting a recommendation
You speak with
A CFO who is not against spending and is against spending without a number attached
Ready to speak?
Free to start. You need a TalkDrill account to speak — reading this page does not.
Browse all roleplay scenariosThe format
The situation
A bank's mobile app has a 2.1-star store rating and 30% year-on-year growth in monthly active users. The top complaint by volume is login failures. Branch traffic is unchanged. The head of digital wants a full rebuild costing ₹9 crore over 18 months.
What you must decide
Rebuild, fix, or neither — and what you would measure to know it worked.
Rounds of questioning
3
Modes
Learn (guided) · Mock (exam-real)
How a roleplay session works
Read your brief
Your role, the situation, and what a good outcome looks like. The counterpart has their own brief, and you do not get to read it.
Open the conversation
You speak first in most scenarios. How you open sets what you can ask for later, which is most of the exercise.
Handle the turn
Somewhere in the middle it stops going your way — a refusal, a counter-offer, a rebuttal you did not prepare for. That moment is the scenario.
Read the report
Outcome, the phrases you used and the ones you missed, fluency and clarity, and the specific line worth rewriting.
What you're scored on
Across every roleplay, the report looks at the same four things — because they are what makes a real conversation work or fail.
Recommend a course of action and justify the spend in terms the CFO uses.
Task outcome
Whether you got what the brief asked for: the refund, the extension, the concession, the point conceded.
Appropriacy
Whether the register fits. A complaint that is too soft gets nothing; the same complaint too hard gets a manager and no refund.
Recovery
What you do with the unexpected turn — repair, rephrase, push back, or stall. This is where most of the marks move.
Delivery
Fluency, pronunciation and pace, judged in conversation rather than in a prepared monologue.
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