Morgan Stanley Business Analytics Interview Questions & Answers

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

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.

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.

A named temporary result introduced with WITH that makes long queries readable and reusable in the same statement.

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.

Create a table, insert a PivotTable, drag region to rows, product to columns, sales to values, and add slicers for month or channel.

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

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

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

Separate inputs, calculations and outputs, link all formulas to input cells, add scenarios and checks, and avoid hard-coded numbers inside formulas.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Prepare clean data, build PivotTables and PivotCharts, add KPI cards and slicers, and arrange everything on one sheet with a clear layout.

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

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.

Map the funnel, find the biggest drop-off, check usability and load time, run A/B tests on fixes and track conversion lift.

A measurable value showing progress to a goal, such as conversion rate, average order value, cart abandonment rate and customer retention.

A model classifying features as basic, performance or delight attributes based on how they affect customer satisfaction, helping decide what to build first.

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

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

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

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.

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

Revenue is total money from sales; profit is what remains after subtracting all costs and expenses.

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.

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

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

Use tables, Power Query, remove volatile functions, filter before calculating and move to Power Pivot or a database when rows reach the millions.

Define a goal metric, a baseline and guardrail metrics, run an experiment or before-after comparison and review adoption, retention and revenue impact.

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).

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

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

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

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

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

Define named scenarios such as best, base and worst with different input values and compare the outputs in a summary report.

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

Reconcile totals with source tables using SQL, check filters and joins for duplication, compare with prior periods and verify with business owners.

ROI = (incremental profit - campaign cost) / campaign cost. Measure incremental sales using a control group or before-after comparison.

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.

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

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.

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

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

A query nested inside another, used for filtering or calculating values such as customers whose spend is above the average.

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

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.

A UML diagram showing actors and the actions (use cases) they perform with the system, giving a quick view of scope.

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

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.

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

Finding the underlying reason for a problem using the 5 Whys, fishbone diagrams or Pareto analysis, then fixing the cause not the symptom.

Testing how changes in key inputs such as price or volume affect the output, in Excel using data tables or scenario manager.

Aggregate revenue per month and use LAG(revenue) OVER (ORDER BY month) to compute (revenue - previous) / previous.