Applied for a McKinsey TPM role on the implementation side (not the core consulting track). The process was different from what I expected, so posting this since I couldn't find much online.
First thing: it's not a pure case interview. You still do cases, but there's a technical layer woven in. My interviewers kept steering the case toward how I'd actually manage delivery. Think less "what's the revenue impact" and more "you're running a 12-month enterprise software rollout and three stakeholders are pulling in different directions, how do you structure the work."
The rounds: Recruiter screen, 30 min. Standard background, motivation for McKinsey specifically. Two "experience" rounds (essentially PEI). They're drilling for structured stories about technical projects you owned end to end. Two case rounds, but both had a "program design" flavor. One was logistics, one was a scaled-agile transformation for a government client. A final round with a senior partner, which was mostly fit and big-picture thinking.
What they actually care about:
They want you to demonstrate that you can sit in a room with a CTO and a VP of Ops and translate between them without either side feeling patronized. If you've only been a PM at a software-first startup, they'll push hard on "have you managed technical delivery with real constraints" (budget, legacy systems, third-party vendors).
The case prep standard case frameworks work fine as a scaffold, but they'll immediately notice if you're reciting MECE structures without connecting it to how programs actually fail. The things that killed candidates in my debrief (I heard secondhand): not having a prioritization POV, not reading stakeholder dynamics, treating the case like a pure number-crunch.
My experience: I got to final round and didn't get an offer. The feedback was that my PEI stories weren't specific enough on the "influence without authority" dimension. For TPM roles, that's basically the whole job. I'd say spend 60% of prep on PEI storytelling and 40% on cases, not the other way around.
Happy to answer specifics if you're in this process.