Urban Company Business Analytics Interview Questions & Answers
Curated interview practice questions with answers. These are practice scenarios, not a verified list of past interview questions.
About Urban Company hiring for Business Analytics roles
Urban Company is an Indian technology platform that connects customers with trained professionals for home services such as cleaning, beauty, appliance repair, plumbing and painting. It handles booking, pricing, partner training and quality control through its app. It hires software engineers, data analysts, product managers and operations roles, and also operates in a few international markets.
For Business Analytics roles, this Urban Company practice set focuses most on Requirements and Agile (7), Case Studies and Guesstimates (7), SQL for Business Analysis (7), Excel for Business Analysts (4). It has 3 easy, 28 medium, 9 hard questions, so you can start easy and work up to the harder ones.
Company type
Product
Headquarters
Gurugram, India
Main India offices
Gurugram
Urban Company Business Analytics interview process
Online coding or analytics assessment
Technical round 1
Technical round 2 (design or case)
Hiring manager and culture round
Typical pattern based on public candidate experiences. Rounds vary by role, team and year.
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01
Write non-functional requirements for an online payment page.
NFR-01 Performance: the payment page loads within 2 seconds for 95 percent of requests at 500 concurrent users. NFR-02 Availability: 99.9 percent monthly uptime outside planned maintenance. NFR-03 Security: card data is never stored by the application, and all traffic uses TLS 1.2 or higher. NFR-04 Compliance: the flow meets PCI DSS and RBI payment guidelines. NFR-05 Usability: works on mobile screens from 360 pixels wide. NFR-06 Audit: every transaction attempt is logged with a timestamp.
02
How would you forecast next quarter's sales in Excel?
Use a replacement plus new-buyer approach. India has about 144 crore people; assume around 60 crore active smartphone users. If people replace phones every 4 years on average, replacements are about 15 crore a year. Add first-time buyers, say 2 to 3 percent of the remaining adult population, roughly 1.5 crore. The estimate is about 16 to 17 crore phones a year, which is close to reported industry numbers of around 15 crore.
04
What does GROUP BY do and how is HAVING different from WHERE?
Build a discounted cash flow comparison over the vehicle life. For buying: purchase price, financing cost, maintenance, insurance, tax benefit of depreciation, and resale value. For leasing: lease rentals, what maintenance is included, tax treatment and end-of-term conditions. Discount both at the company's cost of borrowing and compare present value of costs. Then add qualitative factors: flexibility if volumes drop, technology risk such as a shift to electric vans, and impact on the balance sheet.
06
Daily active users dropped 10 percent week over week. How do you investigate?
Rule out data issues first: tracking changes, app release bugs, pipeline delays or bot filters. Check whether the drop is seasonal by comparing with the same week last year or a festival calendar. Then segment by platform, app version, country or city, acquisition channel and new versus returning users to locate it. Look at the funnel for the core action. Connect findings to releases, outages or marketing changes, then recommend fixes.
07
How would you decide whether to launch a new product?
Assess market size and demand, customer need, competition, unit economics, capabilities, risks and strategic fit, then test with a pilot before scale-up.
08
Split the epic 'Customers can track their order online' into user stories.
Possible stories: As a customer, I want to see my order status (placed, packed, shipped, delivered) so that I know its progress. As a customer, I want an SMS or email when the status changes so that I do not have to check. As a customer, I want the expected delivery date so that I can plan. As a customer, I want a courier tracking link once shipped. As support staff, I want to see the same timeline so that I can answer queries.
Log the change, assess impact on scope, cost and timeline, get approval through change control or backlog grooming, and update documents and stakeholders.
10
Write a DAX measure that shows each category's percent share of total sales.
The subquery probably returns at least one NULL, for example SELECT customer_id FROM orders where some orders have a NULL customer_id. With NOT IN, comparing any value to NULL gives UNKNOWN, so no row passes the condition. Fix it by using NOT EXISTS with a correlated subquery, or a LEFT JOIN with WHERE o.customer_id IS NULL, or by adding WHERE customer_id IS NOT NULL inside the subquery. NOT EXISTS is the safest habit.
12
Write Excel formulas for IRR with yearly cash flows and XIRR with irregular dates.
# Yearly cash flows in B2:B7, year 0 investment negative
=IRR(B2:B7)
# Irregular dates: cash flows in B2:B7, dates in C2:C7
=XIRR(B2:B7, C2:C7)
# XIRR returns an annualised rate based on actual dates,
# which suits SIP returns or projects with uneven payments.
13
How do you calculate monthly revenue growth in SQL?
The story is ambiguous, so bring the three amigos together: BA or product owner, a developer and a tester. Walk through concrete examples, including edge cases and error cases, and write them as acceptance criteria, ideally in Given-When-Then format. Add business rules, sample data and mock-ups where needed. Update the story and use the same practice in refinement for future stories, so gaps are found before coding starts.
15
In the middle of a sprint, a senior stakeholder asks to add an urgent feature. What do you do?
Understand the urgency and the business impact of waiting until the next sprint. Bring it to the product owner, who decides. If it truly cannot wait, the team agrees to swap out work of similar size so the sprint goal stays realistic, and the trade-off is made visible to the stakeholder. If it can wait, add it to the top of the backlog for the next sprint. Avoid silently adding scope.
16
Vendor A has a lower licence price, but Vendor B has lower running costs. How do you compare them?
Compare total cost of ownership over the same period, usually 3 to 5 years. Include licence or subscription fees, implementation, data migration, integration, training, internal staff time, infrastructure, support and upgrade costs, and exit costs. Discount the yearly totals to present value if the timing differs. Then weigh the result against non-cost factors such as fit to requirements, scalability and vendor stability. Often the cheaper licence ends up costlier once customisation and support are added.
17
Guesstimate: what is the annual revenue of one multiplex screen in a large Indian city?
Assume 5 shows a day and 200 seats with 30 percent average occupancy, giving 300 tickets a day. At an average ticket of 250 rupees, ticket revenue is 75,000 rupees a day. Food and beverage adds about 40 percent of ticket revenue, around 30,000, and screen ads maybe 5,000. That is about 1.1 lakh a day, or around 4 crore a year. Weekends and blockbuster releases push occupancy higher.
18
How do you estimate the annual revenue of a coffee shop chain?
Combine several sources. Interview and observe users doing real tasks, and review screens, reports and outputs to infer business rules. Analyse the database and logs to see which data and functions are actually used. Work with long-serving staff and IT support for hidden rules and workarounds. Build AS-IS process maps, decide what to keep, drop or improve, and validate the findings with users. Plan data migration requirements early.
21
Write a SQL query to calculate the repeat purchase rate.
WITH per_customer AS (
SELECT customer_id, COUNT(DISTINCT order_id) AS orders
FROM orders
GROUP BY customer_id
)
SELECT
ROUND(100.0 * SUM(CASE WHEN orders >= 2 THEN 1 ELSE 0 END)
/ COUNT(*), 2) AS repeat_rate_pct
FROM per_customer;
22
What sections does a good software requirements specification (SRS) contain?
A typical SRS includes purpose, scope and definitions; overall description with users, operating environment, assumptions and constraints; functional requirements, each with a unique ID, description, priority and acceptance criteria; external interface requirements for UI, APIs and integrations; non-functional requirements such as performance, security, availability and compliance; data requirements; and appendices with diagrams and a traceability reference. Each requirement should be clear, testable and traceable to a business need.
23
What do statistical significance and p-value mean in an A/B test?
The p-value is the probability of seeing a difference at least as large as observed if the change truly had no effect. If it is below the chosen threshold, often 0.05, the result is called statistically significant. It does not mean there is a 95 percent chance the variant is better, and significance is not the same as business importance. Always report the confidence interval of the lift as well.
24
Tell me about a time you handled a difficult stakeholder.
Use STAR: Situation, Task, Action, Result. Show that you listened, found the underlying goal, used data to align people and reached a documented decision.
25
How would you size the market for IT courses in Delhi NCR?
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.
26
A report query on a 200 million row table takes 15 minutes. How do you optimise it?
Read the execution plan to find full scans and expensive joins. Filter early on partitioned or indexed columns such as date, select only needed columns instead of SELECT *, and avoid functions on filter columns. Pre-aggregate in a CTE before joining, replace correlated subqueries with joins or window functions, and check join keys have matching types. For repeated use, build a summary table or materialised view refreshed daily.
The total profit expected from a customer over the relationship, roughly average margin x purchase frequency x lifespan, compared with acquisition cost.
28
What are dynamic array functions in Excel and how do they help analysts?
Dynamic array functions return several values that spill into neighbouring cells. UNIQUE lists distinct values, SORT and SORTBY order data, FILTER returns rows meeting conditions, SEQUENCE builds number series, and XLOOKUP can return whole rows. For example =SORT(UNIQUE(FILTER(Sales[Region], Sales[Year]=2026))) builds a live region list. They replace many helper columns and Ctrl+Shift+Enter array formulas, and the # operator references a full spill range.
29
Revenue grew but profit fell. Why could that happen?
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.
30
A bank's mobile app logins increased, but digital transactions fell. What could explain this?
Users are coming but not completing transactions, so look at the gap. Possible causes: a release that broke a payment flow, new security steps like extra OTPs adding friction, logins driven by balance checks or offers, or transactions shifting to another channel. Compare the funnel from login to transaction by app version and device, check failure and error rates, and review support complaints before recommending fixes.
31
What is the difference between revenue and profit?
Evaluate attractiveness and ability. Attractiveness: private labels usually earn higher margins, so check category size, how price-sensitive customers are, and whether brand loyalty is weak in categories like staples and cleaning. Ability: supplier availability, quality control, shelf space and brand trust. Estimate the margin gain against cannibalisation of branded sales and supplier relationships. Recommend starting with a few high-volume, low-loyalty categories and measuring repeat purchase.
34
What is the difference between absolute, relative and mixed cell references in Excel?
A relative reference like A1 shifts when the formula is copied. An absolute reference like $A$1 stays fixed, useful for a tax rate or target cell. A mixed reference fixes only the column ($A1) or only the row (A$1), which is handy in multiplication grids or when copying a formula across months and products. Press F4 to cycle through the four options while editing a formula.
35
Write a DAX measure for the product return rate that avoids divide-by-zero errors.
Return Rate % =
VAR ReturnedQty = SUM ( Returns[Quantity] )
VAR SoldQty = SUM ( Sales[Quantity] )
RETURN
DIVIDE ( ReturnedQty, SoldQty, 0 )
// DIVIDE returns the third argument (0) when SoldQty is zero or blank.
// Format the measure as a percentage in the model.
36
How do you write a query to find users active in consecutive months?
Escalate immediately to the business sponsor with the impact: each day without testers delays sign-off and go-live. Ask for named testers with protected time, even part-time. Meanwhile, prepare so no time is lost: finalise test cases, check the environment and data, and plan a short tester briefing. If testers cannot be released, propose re-planning UAT dates rather than letting IT or the BA test on the business's behalf, because acceptance must come from the users.
Situation: the team planned to add more filters to the search page to fix low conversion. Task: I was asked to size the opportunity. Action: funnel analysis showed most drop-off happened after users opened a product page with no delivery date shown, not in search. I shared the data with session recordings. Result: the team prioritised showing delivery dates on the product page, conversion rose about 8 percent, and the filter work was deprioritised.
Tips to crack the Urban Company Business Analytics interview
Practise DSA and low-level design for engineering roles, such as designing a booking or slot allocation system.
For analyst roles, prepare marketplace metrics like fill rate, repeat rate and partner earnings, and practise related SQL queries.
Understand the two-sided marketplace model of customers and service partners, and discuss how both sides stay satisfied.
Keep a one-minute story ready for every project on your CV: problem, your part, tools, result.
Practise the hard questions on this page aloud; Urban Company interviewers usually ask follow-ups on your first answer.
Frequently asked questions
How many rounds are there in the Urban Company Business Analytics interview?
Candidates usually go through 4 stages: Online coding or analytics assessment; Technical round 1; Technical round 2 (design or case); Hiring manager and culture round. The exact rounds change with the role, team, location and your experience, so confirm the process with the recruiter.
Which topics should I prepare for the Urban Company Business Analytics interview?
This practice set leans on Requirements and Agile (7), Case Studies and Guesstimates (7), SQL for Business Analysis (7), Excel for Business Analysts (4). Revise those first, then practise explaining one or two of your own projects end to end, because most Urban Company interviewers ask you to walk through real work.
Are these the exact questions asked at Urban Company?
No. These are curated practice questions that match the skills and difficulty usually tested in product interviews like Urban Company's. They are not a leaked or verified list of past questions.
Where does Urban Company hire Business Analytics professionals in India?
Urban Company has large teams in Gurugram. Openings and locations change often, so check the Urban Company careers page and filter by city and experience.
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