01
What is the difference between revenue and profit?
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Revenue is total money from sales; profit is what remains after subtracting all costs and expenses.
Bloomberg Business Analytics Interview Questions & Answers
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02
What is a CTE?
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A named temporary result introduced with WITH that makes long queries readable and reusable in the same statement.
03
How would you improve a company's low app conversion rate?
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Map the funnel, find the biggest drop-off, check usability and load time, run A/B tests on fixes and track conversion lift.
04
SQL: total revenue per month.
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SELECT DATE_TRUNC('month', order_date) AS month, SUM(amount) AS revenue
FROM orders GROUP BY 1 ORDER BY 1;
-- MySQL: DATE_FORMAT(order_date, '%Y-%m')
05
What is a data table in Excel?
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A what-if tool that recalculates a formula for different inputs, for example loan payments across different rates and tenures.
06
What is a BRD review and who signs it off?
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Stakeholders and the sponsor review the Business Requirements Document for completeness and accuracy, and the business owner gives formal sign-off before design begins.
07
How do you build a forecast in Excel?
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Use historical data with FORECAST.ETS or trend lines, state assumptions, compare against actuals and show best, base and worst scenarios.
08
Which what-if analysis tools does Excel have?
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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).
09
What is a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)?
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The smallest version of a product with enough features to deliver value and gather real user feedback before investing more.
10
A bank wants to reduce customer churn. What would you do?
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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.
11
What does a Business Analyst do?
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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.
12
What is customer lifetime value?
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The total profit expected from a customer over the relationship, roughly average margin x purchase frequency x lifespan, compared with acquisition cost.
13
What is the difference between a chart and a dashboard?
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A chart shows one view of data; a dashboard combines several charts and KPIs on one page for monitoring.
14
How do you build a PivotTable to analyse sales by region and product?
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Create a table, insert a PivotTable, drag region to rows, product to columns, sales to values, and add slicers for month or channel.
15
A food delivery company's orders fell 15%. How do you investigate?
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Check data accuracy, then segment by city, restaurant, time and user type; look at supply, delivery time, pricing, competitors and seasonality before proposing fixes.
16
How do you approach a guesstimate question?
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Clarify the scope, break the problem into logical parts, state assumptions with round numbers, compute step by step and sanity-check the answer.
17
What is root cause analysis and which techniques do you know?
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Finding the underlying reason for a problem using the 5 Whys, fishbone diagrams or Pareto analysis, then fixing the cause not the symptom.
18
How do you protect a worksheet or workbook?
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Review > Protect Sheet or Workbook with a password, lock cells, hide formulas and allow only selected cells to be edited.
19
What is a subquery and when would you use it?
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A query nested inside another, used for filtering or calculating values such as customers whose spend is above the average.
20
What are wireframes and why are they useful for a BA?
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Low-fidelity layouts of screens that help stakeholders visualise and agree on requirements before development starts.
21
How do you evaluate a marketing campaign's ROI?
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ROI = (incremental profit - campaign cost) / campaign cost. Measure incremental sales using a control group or before-after comparison.
22
Use case vs user story?
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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.
23
BRD vs FRD?
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A BRD states what the business needs and why. An FRD details how the system should behave to meet those needs (functional specifications).
24
How would you build a simple financial model in Excel?
Show answer
Separate inputs, calculations and outputs, link all formulas to input cells, add scenarios and checks, and avoid hard-coded numbers inside formulas.
25
SQL: month-over-month revenue growth.
Show answer
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;
26
How do you write a query to find users active in consecutive months?
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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.
27
How do you analyse variance between budget and actual?
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Variance = Actual - Budget, shown as amount and percentage, with conditional formatting to flag large gaps and comments on the drivers.
28
Explain Porter's Five Forces.
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A model assessing industry attractiveness through supplier power, buyer power, threat of new entrants, threat of substitutes and rivalry among competitors.
29
Agile vs Waterfall?
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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.
30
How do you handle large datasets in Excel?
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Use tables, Power Query, remove volatile functions, filter before calculating and move to Power Pivot or a database when rows reach the millions.
31
What is a market entry strategy case?
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Decide whether and how to enter a market by evaluating attractiveness, competition, capabilities and entry mode (build, buy, partner), then risks and next steps.
32
What does GROUP BY do and how is HAVING different from WHERE?
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GROUP BY aggregates rows by column; WHERE filters before grouping and HAVING filters after, using aggregate conditions.
33
How would you estimate the market size for an electric scooter in India?
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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.
34
What is a primary key?
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A column or set of columns that uniquely identifies each row in a table and cannot contain NULL.
35
How do you find the top 5 customers by revenue?
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SELECT customer_id, SUM(amount) AS revenue FROM orders GROUP BY customer_id ORDER BY revenue DESC LIMIT 5;
36
A client's profits are falling. How do you structure the problem?
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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.
37
What is a break-even point?
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The sales volume where total revenue equals total cost. It equals fixed cost divided by contribution margin per unit.
38
What is gap analysis?
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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.
39
What is the 80/20 rule in business analysis?
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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.
40
What are the 4 Ps of marketing?
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Product, Price, Place and Promotion, the levers a business uses to bring an offering to market.
41
How do you calculate monthly revenue growth in SQL?
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Aggregate revenue per month and use LAG(revenue) OVER (ORDER BY month) to compute (revenue - previous) / previous.
42
How would you prioritise 10 features with a limited budget?
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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.
43
XLOOKUP vs VLOOKUP?
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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.
44
What is the use of the IFERROR function?
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It returns a custom value when a formula errors out, keeping reports clean, for example =IFERROR(VLOOKUP(...), "Not found").
45
What is a stakeholder analysis?
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Identifying everyone affected by the project and mapping their influence and interest to decide how to communicate with and involve each group.
46
What is a product backlog vs a sprint backlog?
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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.
47
What is sensitivity analysis?
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Testing how changes in key inputs such as price or volume affect the output, in Excel using data tables or scenario manager.
48
How do you estimate the annual revenue of a coffee shop chain?
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Number of outlets x daily customers x average bill x operating days, then validate using footfall, peak hours and similar chains.
49
Guesstimate: how many pizzas are sold in Mumbai on a weekend?
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About 20 million people, roughly 10% order pizza on a weekend, about 1 pizza per 2 people in an order. This gives roughly 1 million pizzas, adjusted for outlets and delivery capacity.
50
Difference between INNER JOIN and LEFT JOIN?
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INNER returns only matching rows; LEFT returns all rows from the left table and NULLs where there is no match.
51
What is Power Pivot?
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An Excel add-in for building data models with relationships and DAX measures over millions of rows, beyond normal worksheet limits.
52
What is the difference between XLOOKUP and INDEX-MATCH?
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Both look up values flexibly; XLOOKUP is simpler with built-in not-found handling, while INDEX-MATCH works in older Excel versions.
53
What techniques do you use to elicit requirements?
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Interviews, workshops, surveys, observation, document analysis, prototyping and brainstorming, chosen according to stakeholders and project stage.
54
What is a SWOT analysis?
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A framework listing internal Strengths and Weaknesses and external Opportunities and Threats to assess a project or business position.
55
How would you measure the success of a new feature?
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Define a goal metric, a baseline and guardrail metrics, run an experiment or before-after comparison and review adoption, retention and revenue impact.
56
What is Agile and how does Scrum work?
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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.
57
What are aggregate functions?
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Functions that summarise rows into a value, such as COUNT, SUM, AVG, MIN and MAX.
58
What are acceptance criteria?
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Clear, testable conditions a story must meet to be accepted, often written as Given-When-Then scenarios.
59
What is the difference between OLTP and OLAP systems?
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OLTP handles many small day-to-day transactions; OLAP supports analysis over large historical data with aggregates and reporting.
60
What is a user story and what makes it good?
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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.