Tower Research Capital Business Analytics Interview Questions & Answers

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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).

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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;

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

The sales volume where total revenue equals total cost. It equals fixed cost divided by contribution margin per unit.

Create a line or column chart of actuals and add the target as another series formatted as a line.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clarify the scope, break the problem into logical parts, state assumptions with round numbers, compute step by step and sanity-check the answer.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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).

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

A diagram of steps, decisions and owners in a process, made using BPMN or flowcharts in tools like Visio, Lucidchart or draw.io.

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

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

A chart shows one view of data; a dashboard combines several charts and KPIs on one page for monitoring.

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.

Anyone affected by or influencing the project: sponsors, product owners, end users, developers, testers, operations and customers.

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

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

GROUP BY aggregates rows by column; WHERE filters before grouping and HAVING filters after, using aggregate conditions.

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

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

Decide whether and how to enter a market by evaluating attractiveness, competition, capabilities and entry mode (build, buy, partner), then risks and next steps.

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

Score them with RICE or value-vs-effort, align with goals, consider dependencies and risks, validate with stakeholders, then use MoSCoW for the release plan.

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

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.

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

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

Both look up values flexibly; XLOOKUP is simpler with built-in not-found handling, while INDEX-MATCH works in older Excel versions.

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

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

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.

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.

Clarify the underlying goals, present data and trade-offs, facilitate a joint session, escalate to the sponsor if needed and document the agreed decision.