01
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.
Meesho Business Analytics Interview Questions & Answers
Curated interview practice questions with answers. These are practice scenarios, not a verified list of past interview questions.
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02
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.
03
How would you forecast next quarter's sales in Excel?
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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.
04
How would you decide whether to launch a new product?
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Assess market size and demand, customer need, competition, unit economics, capabilities, risks and strategic fit, then test with a pilot before scale-up.
05
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.
06
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;
07
How do you chart a trend with a target line?
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Create a line or column chart of actuals and add the target as another series formatted as a line.
08
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.
09
What is the difference between COUNT(*) and COUNT(column)?
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COUNT(*) counts all rows; COUNT(column) counts only rows where that column is not NULL.
10
How do you find duplicate customers?
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SELECT email, COUNT(*) FROM customers GROUP BY email HAVING COUNT(*) > 1;
11
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.
12
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.
13
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").
14
How do you calculate the percentage contribution of each category?
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SUM(sales) per category divided by SUM(SUM(sales)) OVER () and multiplied by 100 gives each category's share of the total.
15
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.
16
What is scope creep and how do you control it?
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Uncontrolled growth of requirements. Control it with a clear scope statement, change control process, impact analysis and sponsor approval for additions.
17
SQL: top 5 customers by spend.
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SELECT customer_id, SUM(amount) AS spend
FROM orders
GROUP BY customer_id
ORDER BY spend DESC
LIMIT 5;
18
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.
19
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.
20
How do you validate that a report's numbers are correct?
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Reconcile totals with source tables using SQL, check filters and joins for duplication, compare with prior periods and verify with business owners.
21
How do you use Excel's Scenario Manager?
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Define named scenarios such as best, base and worst with different input values and compare the outputs in a summary report.
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
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.
24
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.
25
What is a traceability matrix?
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A table linking each requirement to design, test cases and delivery status, ensuring nothing is missed and helping assess change impact.
26
How do you create a dashboard in Excel?
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Prepare clean data, build PivotTables and PivotCharts, add KPI cards and slicers, and arrange everything on one sheet with a clear layout.
27
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.
28
How would you build a simple financial model in Excel?
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Separate inputs, calculations and outputs, link all formulas to input cells, add scenarios and checks, and avoid hard-coded numbers inside formulas.
29
How do you compute CAGR in Excel?
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CAGR = (End value / Start value)^(1/years) - 1, entered as =(B2/A2)^(1/n)-1.
30
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.
31
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.
32
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.
33
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.
34
Which Excel functions do business analysts use daily?
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VLOOKUP or XLOOKUP, INDEX-MATCH, SUMIFS, COUNTIFS, IF, text functions, PivotTables and charts.
35
What is the profit equation and how do you use it in cases?
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Profit = Revenue minus Cost, where revenue = price x volume and cost = fixed + variable. Split each part to find which one explains a change.
36
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.
37
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.
38
Do a quick SWOT analysis for an ed-tech company.
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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.
39
What is a KPI and give examples for an e-commerce business?
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A measurable value showing progress to a goal, such as conversion rate, average order value, cart abandonment rate and customer retention.
40
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.
41
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.
42
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.
43
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.
44
How would you analyse the declining sales of a retail store?
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Break sales into footfall, conversion and average basket, compare with last year and competitors, and check stock, pricing, staffing and local events.
45
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.
46
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.
47
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.
48
Stakeholders give conflicting requirements. What do you do?
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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.
49
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).
50
Guesstimate: how many cars are sold in India every year?
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Structure it: households × car-owning share ÷ replacement cycle + first-time buyers + commercial fleet. State each assumption clearly and sanity-check the final number.
51
What is Kano model in prioritisation?
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A model classifying features as basic, performance or delight attributes based on how they affect customer satisfaction, helping decide what to build first.
52
What is a feasibility study?
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An early assessment of whether a proposed solution is technically, economically, operationally and legally viable before committing budget.
53
How do you prioritise requirements?
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Use MoSCoW (Must, Should, Could, Won't), value versus effort scoring or the Kano model, agreed with stakeholders based on business value and risk.