Amazon Business Analytics Interview Questions & Answers

Stakeholders and the sponsor review the Business Requirements Document for completeness and accuracy, and the business owner gives formal sign-off before design begins.

Get distinct user-month pairs, self-join or use LAG on month per user, and keep rows where the previous month is exactly one month earlier.

A table linking each requirement to design, test cases and delivery status, ensuring nothing is missed and helping assess change impact.

Reconcile totals with source tables using SQL, check filters and joins for duplication, compare with prior periods and verify with business owners.

Excel suits small to medium data and quick ad-hoc work; SQL queries large databases directly and repeatably.

A diagram of steps, decisions and owners in a process, made using BPMN or flowcharts in tools like Visio, Lucidchart or draw.io.

Identifying everyone affected by the project and mapping their influence and interest to decide how to communicate with and involve each group.

A measurable value showing progress to a goal, such as conversion rate, average order value, cart abandonment rate and customer retention.

Create a line or column chart of actuals and add the target as another series formatted as a line.

Fixed costs stay constant regardless of volume, such as rent; variable costs change with volume, such as raw materials.

Every KPI is a metric, but a KPI is tied directly to a strategic goal (e.g. monthly churn). A metric can be any measurement (e.g. page views).

COUNT(*) counts all rows; COUNT(column) counts only rows where that column is not NULL.

Create a table, insert a PivotTable, drag region to rows, product to columns, sales to values, and add slicers for month or channel.

Functions that summarise rows into a value, such as COUNT, SUM, AVG, MIN and MAX.

A BA bridges business and technology: gathers requirements, analyses data and processes, documents BRD/FRD and makes sure the final solution actually solves the business problem.

Prepare clean data, build PivotTables and PivotCharts, add KPI cards and slicers, and arrange everything on one sheet with a clear layout.

Uncontrolled growth of requirements. Control it with a clear scope statement, change control process, impact analysis and sponsor approval for additions.

Clarify the scope, break the problem into logical parts, state assumptions with round numbers, compute step by step and sanity-check the answer.

Both look up values flexibly; XLOOKUP is simpler with built-in not-found handling, while INDEX-MATCH works in older Excel versions.

VLOOKUP or XLOOKUP, INDEX-MATCH, SUMIFS, COUNTIFS, IF, text functions, PivotTables and charts.

SUM(sales) per category divided by SUM(SUM(sales)) OVER () and multiplied by 100 gives each category's share of the total.

A framework listing internal Strengths and Weaknesses and external Opportunities and Threats to assess a project or business position.

AVG ignores NULLs; use COALESCE(col, 0) if NULLs should count as zero, depending on the business meaning.

The total profit expected from a customer over the relationship, roughly average margin x purchase frequency x lifespan, compared with acquisition cost.

As a customer, I want to reset my password by email so that I can get back into my account. Acceptance criteria: • Reset link expires in 15 minutes • Password rules are shown while typing • A success message appears after reset

Goal Seek (find the input for a target output), Data Tables (see outputs for many inputs) and Scenario Manager (save best, base and worst cases).

The smallest version of a product with enough features to deliver value and gather real user feedback before investing more.

Decide whether and how to enter a market by evaluating attractiveness, competition, capabilities and entry mode (build, buy, partner), then risks and next steps.

A model classifying features as basic, performance or delight attributes based on how they affect customer satisfaction, helping decide what to build first.

A table assigning Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed roles per task so ownership is clear.

Strengths and Weaknesses are internal; Opportunities and Threats are external. Example: S = strong faculty, W = low brand awareness, O = AI upskilling demand, T = free online content.

Testing how changes in key inputs such as price or volume affect the output, in Excel using data tables or scenario manager.

Log the change, assess impact on scope, cost and timeline, get approval through change control or backlog grooming, and update documents and stakeholders.

Check row counts against the source, nulls, duplicates on keys, value ranges, date coverage and that totals reconcile with finance reports.

Revenue is total money from sales; profit is what remains after subtracting all costs and expenses.

ROI = (incremental profit - campaign cost) / campaign cost. Measure incremental sales using a control group or before-after comparison.

The product backlog is the ordered list of all desired work; the sprint backlog is the subset the team commits to in the current sprint.

Define churn, analyse who leaves and why, segment customers, find drivers through data and surveys, design retention offers and measure uplift with a control group.

Population about 20 million, adult tea drinkers about 50%, cups bought outside per person around 1 on average. This gives roughly 10 million cups, then adjust for offices and stalls.

Score them with RICE or value-vs-effort, align with goals, consider dependencies and risks, validate with stakeholders, then use MoSCoW for the release plan.

Use STAR: Situation, Task, Action, Result. Show that you listened, found the underlying goal, used data to align people and reached a documented decision.

Agile delivers value in small increments with feedback. Scrum organises work in sprints with planning, daily stand-ups, review and retrospective, led by a Scrum Master and Product Owner.

Check market size (population, online ordering share), competition, restaurant supply, unit economics per order, CAC and payback period. Propose a pilot with clear success metrics.

Variance = Actual - Budget, shown as amount and percentage, with conditional formatting to flag large gaps and comments on the drivers.

A what-if tool that recalculates a formula for different inputs, for example loan payments across different rates and tenures.

Compare the current state (as-is) with the desired state (to-be), list the gaps in process, people or technology, and plan actions to close them.

XLOOKUP can look left or right, uses exact match by default, returns a custom value if nothing is found and doesn't break when columns move. VLOOKUP only looks right and needs a column number.

Clarify the goal behind each request, map them to business objectives, prioritise with MoSCoW, run a joint session, then document the decision and get sign-off.

Pareto principle: about 80% of outcomes come from 20% of causes, such as most revenue from a few customers or most defects from a few issues.

Clarify the underlying goals, present data and trade-offs, facilitate a joint session, escalate to the sponsor if needed and document the agreed decision.

The sales volume where total revenue equals total cost. It equals fixed cost divided by contribution margin per unit.

A model assessing industry attractiveness through supplier power, buyer power, threat of new entrants, threat of substitutes and rivalry among competitors.

Break sales into footfall, conversion and average basket, compare with last year and competitors, and check stock, pricing, staffing and local events.

Profit = Revenue minus Cost, where revenue = price x volume and cost = fixed + variable. Split each part to find which one explains a change.

Define named scenarios such as best, base and worst with different input values and compare the outputs in a summary report.

WITH m AS (SELECT month, SUM(amount) AS rev FROM orders GROUP BY month) SELECT month, rev, ROUND(100.0 * (rev - LAG(rev) OVER (ORDER BY month)) / LAG(rev) OVER (ORDER BY month), 1) AS mom_pct FROM m;

It breaks a top metric into drivers: Revenue = Users × Conversion × AOV; Users = New + Returning, and so on. It shows which lever to pull and where a drop came from.

Review > Protect Sheet or Workbook with a password, lock cells, hide formulas and allow only selected cells to be edited.

They help the Product Owner refine the backlog, write stories and acceptance criteria, clarify details with developers and support testing and demos.

Number of outlets x daily customers x average bill x operating days, then validate using footfall, peak hours and similar chains.

Use historical data with FORECAST.ETS or trend lines, state assumptions, compare against actuals and show best, base and worst scenarios.

Combine cost-plus, competitor benchmarks and willingness to pay from research, test tiers with experiments and check margin and churn impact.

Anyone affected by or influencing the project: sponsors, product owners, end users, developers, testers, operations and customers.

A language for querying databases. BAs use it to pull data themselves, validate numbers, check reports and answer questions without waiting for engineers.

Use FORECAST.ETS or a trendline on monthly history, check seasonality, compare with a simple moving average and present a range, not a single number.

Look at the cost side: heavier discounts, higher CAC, logistics costs, product mix shifting to low-margin items, one-time expenses or pricing changes. Break contribution margin down by segment.

A UML diagram showing actors and the actions (use cases) they perform with the system, giving a quick view of scope.

Break-even units = Fixed costs ÷ (Price − Variable cost per unit). Add a data table to test different price and volume scenarios.

Top-down: two-wheeler market x EV share x addressable segment. Bottom-up: target households x adoption rate x price. Compare both for a sanity check.

Interviews, workshops, surveys, observation, document analysis, prototyping and brainstorming, chosen according to stakeholders and project stage.

Clear, testable conditions a story must meet to be accepted, often written as Given-When-Then scenarios.

Waterfall runs fixed phases one after another with requirements frozen early. Agile delivers in short sprints with continuous feedback, so requirements can change. In Agile, BAs maintain the backlog and user stories.