Case study: the ten-minute delivery promise is losing money
You have fifteen minutes with a member of the operating committee. Present your recommendation, then defend it.
An advanced-level session of about 10 minutes. You present a decision and take 3 rounds of questions on it.
Two of your fifteen minutes go on the recommendation itself; the other thirteen are questions, and that is where the session is decided. So the opening has to be short enough to leave room and specific enough that what follows is about your reasoning rather than about what you meant. Then the brief's own numbers come back from angles you did not rehearse — order density, which hours actually lose money, what the promise costs to keep at the margin. The committee member has read the same material, so a challenge usually points at something real. Answer it, and if it changes your view, say that it has. Keep a running note of what you have conceded; by minute ten a recommendation can quietly become something you no longer hold.
Angles worth taking
- Lead with the decision in one sentence so the time left is spent on reasons instead of on reaching them.
- Tie every claim to a figure in the brief, because unsupported confidence is the first thing lost in this room.
- Separate the promise from the business: where the ten minutes earns its cost, and where it plainly does not.
- When you concede a point, say what still holds afterwards so the concession does not read as withdrawal.
- If one assumption drives the whole answer, name it early so the argument happens there and not in the detail.
Who is in the room
You play
A candidate presenting a recommendation
You speak with
A member of the operating committee who has read the same brief and questions the reasoning behind the recommendation
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 quick-commerce company loses ₹28 on every ten-minute order and ₹4 on every thirty-minute order. Ten-minute orders are 60% of volume. Customer surveys say speed is the top reason people chose the app. Marketing believes dropping the promise ends the brand.
What you must decide
Keep, price, or retire the ten-minute promise — and say what happens to volume if you are wrong.
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.
Present a clear recommendation in under two minutes, then defend it with the numbers in the brief.
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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