01
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.
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02
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.
03
What is Kano model in prioritisation?
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A model classifying features as basic, performance or delight attributes based on how they affect customer satisfaction, helping decide what to build first.
04
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.
05
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.
06
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).
07
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.
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
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.
10
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.
11
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.
12
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.
13
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.
14
Guesstimate: how many cars are sold in India every year?
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Structure it: households × car-owning share ÷ replacement cycle + first-time buyers + commercial fleet. State each assumption clearly and sanity-check the final number.
15
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.
16
What is a product backlog vs a sprint backlog?
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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.
17
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.
18
How do you find duplicate customers?
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SELECT email, COUNT(*) FROM customers GROUP BY email HAVING COUNT(*) > 1;
19
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.
20
How would you prioritise 10 features with a limited budget?
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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.
21
What are wireframes and why are they useful for a BA?
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Low-fidelity layouts of screens that help stakeholders visualise and agree on requirements before development starts.
22
What is a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)?
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The smallest version of a product with enough features to deliver value and gather real user feedback before investing more.
23
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.
24
Tell me about a time you handled a difficult stakeholder.
Show answer
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 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.
26
Agile vs Waterfall?
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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.
27
What is a subquery and when would you use it?
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A query nested inside another, used for filtering or calculating values such as customers whose spend is above the average.
28
SQL: total revenue per month.
Show answer
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')
29
Explain Porter's Five Forces.
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A model assessing industry attractiveness through supplier power, buyer power, threat of new entrants, threat of substitutes and rivalry among competitors.
30
What is a use case diagram?
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A UML diagram showing actors and the actions (use cases) they perform with the system, giving a quick view of scope.
31
How do you find the top 5 customers by revenue?
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SELECT customer_id, SUM(amount) AS revenue FROM orders GROUP BY customer_id ORDER BY revenue DESC LIMIT 5;
32
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.
33
What is root cause analysis and which techniques do you know?
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Finding the underlying reason for a problem using the 5 Whys, fishbone diagrams or Pareto analysis, then fixing the cause not the symptom.
34
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.
35
How do you prioritise requirements?
Show answer
Use MoSCoW (Must, Should, Could, Won't), value versus effort scoring or the Kano model, agreed with stakeholders based on business value and risk.
36
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.
37
Use case vs user story?
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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.
38
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.
39
What is a stakeholder and who are the typical stakeholders in a project?
Show answer
Anyone affected by or influencing the project: sponsors, product owners, end users, developers, testers, operations and customers.
40
How do you calculate the percentage contribution of each category?
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SUM(sales) per category divided by SUM(SUM(sales)) OVER () and multiplied by 100 gives each category's share of the total.
41
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.
42
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.
43
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.
44
Should a food-delivery app launch in a new city?
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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.
45
What is a process flow and which tools do you use?
Show answer
A diagram of steps, decisions and owners in a process, made using BPMN or flowcharts in tools like Visio, Lucidchart or draw.io.
46
Revenue grew but profit fell. Why could that happen?
Show answer
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.
47
Which Excel functions do business analysts use daily?
Show answer
VLOOKUP or XLOOKUP, INDEX-MATCH, SUMIFS, COUNTIFS, IF, text functions, PivotTables and charts.
48
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.
49
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.
50
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.
51
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.
52
What is a SWOT analysis?
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A framework listing internal Strengths and Weaknesses and external Opportunities and Threats to assess a project or business position.
53
Guesstimate: how many pizzas are sold in Mumbai on a weekend?
Show answer
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.
54
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.
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 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.
57
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).
58
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.
59
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.
60
A client's profits are falling. How do you structure the problem?
Show answer
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.
61
How do you build a forecast in Excel?
Show answer
Use historical data with FORECAST.ETS or trend lines, state assumptions, compare against actuals and show best, base and worst scenarios.
62
What is a RACI matrix?
Show answer
A table assigning Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed roles per task so ownership is clear.