Barclays Business Analytics Interview Questions & Answers

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.

Assess market size and demand, customer need, competition, unit economics, capabilities, risks and strategic fit, then test with a pilot before scale-up.

Structure it: households × car-owning share ÷ replacement cycle + first-time buyers + commercial fleet. State each assumption clearly and sanity-check the final number.

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

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

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.

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

GROUP BY aggregates rows by column; WHERE filters before grouping and HAVING filters after, using aggregate conditions.

INNER returns only matching rows; LEFT returns all rows from the left table and NULLs where there is no match.

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

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.

OLTP handles many small day-to-day transactions; OLAP supports analysis over large historical data with aggregates and reporting.

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).

Check data accuracy, then segment by city, restaurant, time and user type; look at supply, delivery time, pricing, competitors and seasonality before proposing fixes.

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

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.

A use case describes the full interaction between an actor and the system (main and alternate flows). A user story is a short statement of need from the user's point of view, refined with acceptance criteria.

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

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

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.

Low-fidelity layouts of screens that help stakeholders visualise and agree on requirements before development starts.

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

It returns a custom value when a formula errors out, keeping reports clean, for example =IFERROR(VLOOKUP(...), "Not found").

Product, Price, Place and Promotion, the levers a business uses to bring an offering to market.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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;

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

An early assessment of whether a proposed solution is technically, economically, operationally and legally viable before committing budget.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

A short requirement written as 'As a user, I want X so that Y', backed by acceptance criteria. Good stories follow INVEST: independent, negotiable, valuable, estimable, small and testable.

A BRD states what the business needs and why. An FRD details how the system should behave to meet those needs (functional specifications).

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

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

CAGR = (End value / Start value)^(1/years) - 1, entered as =(B2/A2)^(1/n)-1.

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

Split into revenue and cost, then revenue into price, volume and mix, and cost into fixed and variable; check internal factors and external market factors.

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

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