PayPal Business Analytics Interview Questions & Answers

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.

VLOOKUP or XLOOKUP, INDEX-MATCH, SUMIFS, COUNTIFS, IF, text functions, PivotTables and charts.

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

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;

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

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.

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

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

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

Variance = Actual - Budget, shown as amount and percentage, with conditional formatting to flag large gaps and comments on the drivers.

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

Uncontrolled growth of requirements. Control it with a clear scope statement, change control process, impact analysis and sponsor approval for additions.

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.

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.

Number of outlets x daily customers x average bill x operating days, then validate using footfall, peak hours and similar chains.

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

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

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

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

An Excel add-in for building data models with relationships and DAX measures over millions of rows, beyond normal worksheet limits.

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

The smallest version of a product with enough features to deliver value and gather real user feedback before investing more.

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.

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.

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

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

A column or set of columns that uniquely identifies each row in a table and cannot contain NULL.

Use MoSCoW (Must, Should, Could, Won't), value versus effort scoring or the Kano model, agreed with stakeholders based on business value and risk.

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.

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

Break-even units = Fixed costs ÷ (Price − Variable cost per unit). Add a data table to test different price and volume scenarios.

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).

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

The total profit expected from a customer over the relationship, roughly average margin x purchase frequency x lifespan, compared with acquisition cost.

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.

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

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

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

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

A table linking each requirement to design, test cases and delivery status, ensuring nothing is missed and helping assess change impact.

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.

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

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.

Review > Protect Sheet or Workbook with a password, lock cells, hide formulas and allow only selected cells to be edited.

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

A BRD states what the business needs and why. An FRD details how the system should behave to meet those needs (functional specifications).

It returns a custom value when a formula errors out, keeping reports clean, for example =IFERROR(VLOOKUP(...), "Not found").

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

A what-if tool that recalculates a formula for different inputs, for example loan payments across different rates and tenures.

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

A table assigning Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed roles per task so ownership is clear.