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Meta 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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01

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')
02

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.
03

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.
04

What is SQL and why do business analysts need it?

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A language for querying databases. BAs use it to pull data themselves, validate numbers, check reports and answer questions without waiting for engineers.
05

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.
06

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.
07

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.
08

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.
09

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.
10

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.
11

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.
12

KPI vs metric?

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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).
13

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.
14

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.
15

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.
16

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.
17

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.
18

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.
19

What is the difference between SQL and Excel for analysis?

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Excel suits small to medium data and quick ad-hoc work; SQL queries large databases directly and repeatably.
20

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.
21

How do you manage conflicting requirements from two senior stakeholders?

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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

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.
23

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.
24

Revenue grew but profit fell. Why could that happen?

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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.
25

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.
26

How would you size the market for IT courses in Delhi NCR?

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Top-down: NCR population aged 18–30 × share of graduates × share wanting paid upskilling × average fee. Cross-check bottom-up with institutes × batches × students × fees. State your assumptions.
27

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.
28

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").
29

How would you price a new subscription product?

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Combine cost-plus, competitor benchmarks and willingness to pay from research, test tiers with experiments and check margin and churn impact.
30

How do you handle changing requirements?

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Log the change, assess impact on scope, cost and timeline, get approval through change control or backlog grooming, and update documents and stakeholders.
31

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.
32

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.
33

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.
34

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.
35

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.
36

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.
37

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.
38

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.
39

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.
40

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.
41

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.
42

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.
43

What is the role of a BA in Scrum?

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They help the Product Owner refine the backlog, write stories and acceptance criteria, clarify details with developers and support testing and demos.
44

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.
45

How do you handle NULL values when calculating averages?

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AVG ignores NULLs; use COALESCE(col, 0) if NULLs should count as zero, depending on the business meaning.
46

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.
47

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.
48

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.
49

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.
50

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).
51

Tell me about a time you handled a difficult stakeholder.

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Use STAR: Situation, Task, Action, Result. Show that you listened, found the underlying goal, used data to align people and reached a documented decision.
52

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.
53

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.
54

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.
55

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.
56

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.
57

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.
58

What are fixed costs and variable costs?

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Fixed costs stay constant regardless of volume, such as rent; variable costs change with volume, such as raw materials.
59

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.
60

What is a KPI tree?

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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.
61

SQL: month-over-month revenue growth.

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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;
62

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).
63

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.
64

How do you validate data before analysis?

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Check row counts against the source, nulls, duplicates on keys, value ranges, date coverage and that totals reconcile with finance reports.
65

Guesstimate: how many cups of tea are sold in Delhi per day?

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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.
66

What are functional and non-functional requirements?

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Functional requirements describe what the system does (login, reports); non-functional ones describe how well it does it (speed, security, availability, usability).
67

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.
68

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.
69

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.
70

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.
71

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.