01
Which what-if analysis tools does Excel have?
Show answer
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).
Broadcom Business Analytics Interview Questions & Answers
Curated interview practice questions with answers. These are practice scenarios, not a verified list of past interview questions.
About Broadcom hiring for Business Analytics roles
Broadcom is a global technology company that designs semiconductors for networking, broadband, wireless and storage, and also sells infrastructure software. Its software business includes VMware, CA Technologies and Symantec enterprise products acquired over the years. In India it hires chip design and verification engineers, embedded engineers and software engineers for its semiconductor and software divisions.
For Business Analytics roles, this Broadcom practice set focuses most on Case Studies and Guesstimates (7), Excel for Business Analysts (6), SQL for Business Analysis (6), Financial and Business Analysis (5). It has 5 easy, 29 medium, 6 hard questions, so you can start easy and work up to the harder ones.
- Company type
- Hardware & semiconductors
- Headquarters
- Palo Alto, California, USA
- Main India offices
- Bengaluru, Pune, Chennai
Broadcom Business Analytics interview process
- Online assessment or resume screening
- Technical round 1 (digital design or coding)
- Technical round 2 (domain depth)
- Hiring manager round
Typical pattern based on public candidate experiences. Rounds vary by role, team and year.
Solved for BroadcomStart practicing
3 QUESTIONS FREESign up to unlock the full question bank and track your progress.Unlock every question and answer, then continue practising company-wise and package-wise.
3 questions free Unlock the rest in seconds
02
How do you compute CAGR in Excel?
Show answer
CAGR = (End value / Start value)^(1/years) - 1, entered as =(B2/A2)^(1/n)-1.
03
What are the current ratio and the quick ratio?
Show answer
Both measure short-term liquidity. The current ratio is current assets divided by current liabilities; around 1.5 to 2 is often comfortable, though it varies by industry. The quick ratio excludes inventory and prepaid items: (cash plus marketable securities plus receivables) divided by current liabilities. It is stricter because inventory may not sell quickly. A retailer with a current ratio of 1.8 but a quick ratio of 0.4 depends heavily on selling its stock to pay bills.
04
What is the cash conversion cycle?
Show answer
The cash conversion cycle measures how many days cash is tied up in operations. It equals days inventory outstanding plus days sales outstanding minus days payables outstanding. Example: inventory sits 40 days, customers pay in 30 days and suppliers are paid in 45 days, so the cycle is 40 + 30 - 45 = 25 days. A shorter cycle means less working capital is needed. Some marketplaces have a negative cycle because they collect from customers before paying sellers.
05
Guesstimate: how many new two-wheeler helmets are sold in India each year?
Show answer
Drive it from vehicles. Assume about 2 crore new two-wheelers are sold a year, each with an average of 1.5 helmets bought (rider plus pillion), giving 3 crore. The existing fleet is around 25 crore vehicles; assume 60 percent are active and each active vehicle replaces one helmet every 3 years: 15 crore / 3 = 5 crore. Total is about 8 crore helmets a year. Sanity check: enforcement varies by state, so give a range of 6 to 9 crore.
06
Guesstimate: how many pizzas are sold in Mumbai on a weekend?
Show answer
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.
07
A feature launched two months ago is used by only 4 percent of users. What would you do?
Show answer
Find out whether it is a discovery problem or a value problem. Check how many users saw the entry point, how many tried it and how many returned. If few saw it, test better placement or onboarding prompts. If many tried and few returned, interview users and review session recordings to understand why. Also check if the 4 percent are high-value users. Then decide to improve, reposition or remove it.
08
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;
09
How would you estimate the market size for an electric scooter in India?
Show answer
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.
10
Your AS-IS map of a loan approval process shows 14 handoffs between teams. How do you identify improvements?
Show answer
First measure each handoff: waiting time, rework rate and volume, using system timestamps where possible. Then classify steps as value-adding, required for compliance or waste. Look for patterns: repeated approvals, information re-entered in two systems, work bouncing back for missing documents. Typical fixes are merging roles, adding a checklist at intake so applications arrive complete, parallelising checks and automating rule-based approvals. Quantify the expected reduction in cycle time for each option.
11
How would you analyse the declining sales of a retail store?
Show answer
Break sales into footfall, conversion and average basket, compare with last year and competitors, and check stock, pricing, staffing and local events.
12
How do you write a query to find users active in consecutive months?
Show answer
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.
13
How do you build a PivotTable to analyse sales by region and product?
Show answer
Create a table, insert a PivotTable, drag region to rows, product to columns, sales to values, and add slicers for month or channel.
14
How do you chart a trend with a target line?
Show answer
Create a line or column chart of actuals and add the target as another series formatted as a line.
15
What is a feasibility study?
Show answer
An early assessment of whether a proposed solution is technically, economically, operationally and legally viable before committing budget.
16
Developers and testers interpret the same user story differently. How do you fix this?
Show answer
The story is ambiguous, so bring the three amigos together: BA or product owner, a developer and a tester. Walk through concrete examples, including edge cases and error cases, and write them as acceptance criteria, ideally in Given-When-Then format. Add business rules, sample data and mock-ups where needed. Update the story and use the same practice in refinement for future stories, so gaps are found before coding starts.
17
Revenue is 50 crore, cost of goods sold 30 crore, operating expenses 12 crore and depreciation 2 crore. Calculate EBITDA and EBITDA margin.
Show answer
Operating expenses here exclude depreciation. Gross profit is 50 - 30 = 20 crore. EBITDA is gross profit minus operating expenses: 20 - 12 = 8 crore. EBITDA margin is 8 / 50 = 16 percent. EBIT is EBITDA minus depreciation, 8 - 2 = 6 crore, which is a 12 percent operating margin. In an interview, state your assumption about whether operating expenses include depreciation, because that changes the answer.
18
What is a spike in Agile and when would a business analyst request one?
Show answer
A spike is a time-boxed story used for research or experimentation to reduce uncertainty, not to deliver a feature. Its output is knowledge, such as a recommendation or a prototype. A BA might request one when the team cannot estimate a story because an external API, a data source or a regulation is unclear, for example checking whether a payment gateway supports partial refunds. The time box, often one to three days, prevents open-ended investigation.
19
The CEO wants one KPI to judge the customer support team. What would you propose?
Show answer
A single KPI can be gamed, so I would propose one headline with guardrails. The headline could be first-contact resolution rate, because it reflects solving problems, not just closing tickets. Guardrails would be customer satisfaction score after the ticket and median first response time. I would also watch ticket volume per thousand orders, which shows whether product issues are falling. Review targets quarterly with the support head.
20
A business head wants 25 charts on one dashboard page. How do you respond?
Show answer
Ask what decisions they make weekly and which three to five KPIs drive them. Propose a summary page with those KPIs, trends and one breakdown, then drill-through or separate pages for detail. Show a quick mock-up of both versions so they see the clutter and the load time. Use bookmarks or a field parameter to let them switch views without adding charts. Agree on the layout before building.
21
How do you manage conflicting requirements from two senior stakeholders?
Show 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.
22
Revenue grew but profit fell. Why could that happen?
Show answer
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.
23
How do you handle changing requirements?
Show answer
Log the change, assess impact on scope, cost and timeline, get approval through change control or backlog grooming, and update documents and stakeholders.
24
What steps would you follow to create a tracking plan for a new 'save for later' feature?
Show answer
Start from the questions to answer: how many users discover it, use it and later buy saved items. Define events such as save_clicked, saved_item_viewed, saved_item_removed and saved_item_purchased, with properties like product ID, price, source screen and platform. Follow the existing naming convention, assign owners, review with developers, and test events in a staging build. Build the dashboard before launch so data is checked on day one.
25
How do you calculate cycle time, touch time and process efficiency? Give an example.
Show answer
Cycle time (lead time) is the total elapsed time from the start to the end of a case. Touch time is the time someone actually works on it. Process cycle efficiency is touch time divided by cycle time. Example: a refund takes 5 working days (40 working hours) end to end, but the agents spend only 2 hours in total working on it. Efficiency is 2 / 40 = 5 percent, so 95 percent of the time is waiting, and queues are the main target.
26
What is the difference between SQL and Excel for analysis?
Show answer
Excel suits small to medium data and quick ad-hoc work; SQL queries large databases directly and repeatably.
27
Tell me about yourself, for a business analyst role.
Show answer
Keep it to about 90 seconds in a present, past, future flow. For example: I am a commerce graduate working as an analyst intern, where I build Excel and Power BI reports and write SQL queries for the sales team. Earlier, my college project analysed customer churn for a local gym and recommended changes they adopted. I want to grow as a business analyst because I enjoy turning business problems into clear requirements and data-driven decisions.
28
What is the logical order in which a SQL SELECT query is executed?
Show answer
Logically the database processes FROM and JOIN first, then WHERE, GROUP BY, HAVING, SELECT, DISTINCT, ORDER BY and finally LIMIT or TOP. This explains common errors: you cannot use a SELECT alias in WHERE because WHERE runs earlier, aggregate conditions must go in HAVING, and window functions cannot be filtered in WHERE, so you wrap them in a CTE or subquery. The optimiser may physically reorder steps, but the result follows this order.
29
Tell me about a time your analysis changed a product decision.
Show answer
Situation: the team planned to add more filters to the search page to fix low conversion. Task: I was asked to size the opportunity. Action: funnel analysis showed most drop-off happened after users opened a product page with no delivery date shown, not in search. I shared the data with session recordings. Result: the team prioritised showing delivery dates on the product page, conversion rose about 8 percent, and the filter work was deprioritised.
30
Write a SQL query to find the second-highest salary in an employees table.
Show answer
SELECT MAX(salary) AS second_highest
FROM employees
WHERE salary < (SELECT MAX(salary) FROM employees);
-- or with a window function
SELECT DISTINCT salary FROM (
SELECT salary, DENSE_RANK() OVER (ORDER BY salary DESC) AS rk
FROM employees
) t WHERE rk = 2;
31
Monthly subscription churn jumped from 3 percent to 5 percent. How do you investigate?
Show answer
Confirm the data first: definition changes, failed-payment handling or a billing date shift. Then segment churn by plan, tenure, acquisition channel, city and device to find where it concentrates. Separate voluntary cancellations from involuntary card failures. Look at events before the jump, like a price change, app release or competitor offer, and read cancellation reasons. Recommend targeted fixes, such as payment retries or win-back offers, and track the affected cohort.
32
What is the 80/20 rule in business analysis?
Show answer
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.
33
How do you calculate monthly revenue growth in SQL?
Show answer
Aggregate revenue per month and use LAG(revenue) OVER (ORDER BY month) to compute (revenue - previous) / previous.
34
You receive two customer lists from sales and billing and must reconcile them. How do you do it?
Show answer
Standardise both first: trim spaces, fix case, convert IDs to the same type and remove duplicates. Use a unique key like customer ID, or a combined key of phone and email if IDs differ. Then use XLOOKUP or COUNTIFS to mark each record as matched, only in sales or only in billing, or a Power Query merge with anti joins. Summarise mismatches by type and share the exception list with both owners.
35
A quick-commerce company wants to expand into Tier-2 cities. What would you analyse before recommending it?
Show answer
Demand: population density, smartphone and digital payment penetration, average basket size and how often people buy groceries. Supply: dark store rent, rider availability and local sourcing. Unit economics: orders per store per day needed to break even, given lower average order values. Competition: local kirana delivery and other apps. Then propose a pilot in two or three cities with clear success metrics such as orders per day, contribution margin per order and repeat rate before scaling.
36
Write Excel formulas for IRR with yearly cash flows and XIRR with irregular dates.
Show answer
# Yearly cash flows in B2:B7, year 0 investment negative
=IRR(B2:B7)
# Irregular dates: cash flows in B2:B7, dates in C2:C7
=XIRR(B2:B7, C2:C7)
# XIRR returns an annualised rate based on actual dates,
# which suits SIP returns or projects with uneven payments.
37
Split the epic 'Customers can track their order online' into user stories.
Show answer
Possible stories: As a customer, I want to see my order status (placed, packed, shipped, delivered) so that I know its progress. As a customer, I want an SMS or email when the status changes so that I do not have to check. As a customer, I want the expected delivery date so that I can plan. As a customer, I want a courier tracking link once shipped. As support staff, I want to see the same timeline so that I can answer queries.
38
How do you influence stakeholders when you have no direct authority?
Show answer
Build credibility with accurate work and by understanding each stakeholder's goals and pressures. Frame proposals in terms of their outcomes, such as cost saved or targets met, and back them with data. Involve them early so ideas feel shared, find allies who already support the change, and pilot small to show results. Be transparent about trade-offs. Influence comes from trust built over time, not one meeting.
39
Write an Excel formula for a two-way lookup that finds sales for a given product and month.
Show answer
// products in A2:A50, months in B1:M1, data in B2:M50
// G1 = product, G2 = month
=INDEX(B2:M50, MATCH(G1, A2:A50, 0), MATCH(G2, B1:M1, 0))
// Excel 365 alternative
=XLOOKUP(G1, A2:A50, XLOOKUP(G2, B1:M1, B2:M50))
40
Write an Excel formula for the NPV of a project with an initial investment today and five yearly cash inflows.
Show answer
# B1 = discount rate (for example 12%)
# B2 = initial investment entered as a negative number
# B3:B7 = cash inflows for years 1 to 5
=NPV(B1, B3:B7) + B2
# NPV() assumes the first value comes at the end of year 1,
# so the year-0 investment is added outside the function.
Tips to crack the Broadcom Business Analytics interview
- For hardware roles, revise digital electronics, Verilog, computer architecture and verification concepts such as SystemVerilog and UVM.
- For software roles, revise C, data structures, operating systems and networking, especially for VMware and infrastructure software teams.
- Be ready to go deep into your project, explaining design decisions and debugging steps, as interviewers often probe details.
- Keep a one-minute story ready for every project on your CV: problem, your part, tools, result.
- Practise the hard questions on this page aloud; Broadcom interviewers usually ask follow-ups on your first answer.
Frequently asked questions
How many rounds are there in the Broadcom Business Analytics interview?
Candidates usually go through 4 stages: Online assessment or resume screening; Technical round 1 (digital design or coding); Technical round 2 (domain depth); Hiring manager round. The exact rounds change with the role, team, location and your experience, so confirm the process with the recruiter.
Which topics should I prepare for the Broadcom Business Analytics interview?
This practice set leans on Case Studies and Guesstimates (7), Excel for Business Analysts (6), SQL for Business Analysis (6), Financial and Business Analysis (5). Revise those first, then practise explaining one or two of your own projects end to end, because most Broadcom interviewers ask you to walk through real work.
Are these the exact questions asked at Broadcom?
No. These are curated practice questions that match the skills and difficulty usually tested in hardware & semiconductors interviews like Broadcom's. They are not a leaked or verified list of past questions.
Where does Broadcom hire Business Analytics professionals in India?
Broadcom has large teams in Bengaluru, Pune, Chennai. Openings and locations change often, so check the Broadcom careers page and filter by city and experience.
Business Analytics questions for similar companies
Hardware & semiconductors
Texas Instruments
Business Analytics interview questions
Bengaluru
View questionsHardware & semiconductors
Samsung
Business Analytics interview questions
Bengaluru, Noida, Delhi
View questionsHardware & semiconductors
Qualcomm
Business Analytics interview questions
Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Chennai
View questionsHardware & semiconductors
Dell Technologies
Business Analytics interview questions
Bengaluru, Hyderabad
View questionsHardware & semiconductors
AMD
Business Analytics interview questions
Bengaluru, Hyderabad
View questionsHardware & semiconductors
Apple
Business Analytics interview questions
Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Mumbai +1
View questionsMore ways to practise
Company-wise Business Analytics questionsPackage-wise Business Analytics questionsExperience-wise Business Analytics questionsRole-wise Business Analytics questionsCity-wise Business Analytics questionsMost asked Business Analytics questionsScenario-based questionsPractical / hands-on questionsHR & behavioural questionsBusiness Analytics mock interviewOnline assessment questionsTechnical round questionsManagerial round questionsBusiness Analytics topic sheets