Business Metrics and Unit Economics Questions

Evaluate a candidates ability to analyze the financial drivers and per customer economics that determine business sustainability and growth. Core concepts include revenue streams and pricing, gross margin, contribution margin, operating margin, customer acquisition cost, lifetime value per customer, lifetime value to customer acquisition cost ratio, payback period, average revenue per user, churn and retention rates, and metrics for subscription or recurring revenue models such as annual recurring revenue, monthly recurring revenue, expansion revenue, and contraction effects. Candidates should be able to perform back of the envelope calculations and sensitivity analysis, interpret trade offs between growth and profitability, link marketing product and channel activities to financial outcomes, explain how metrics vary by customer segment or acquisition channel, and make strategic recommendations such as pricing adjustments, segmentation strategies, acquisition channel shifts, or investment versus efficiency decisions. Interviewers may request simple calculations, scenario analysis, and prioritized actions grounded in metric changes.

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

Describe how you would perform a back-of-envelope sensitivity analysis to show executives how LTV changes if monthly churn varies between 3% and 12% and ARPU varies between 20 USD and 40 USD. Which visual would you present, what axes, and how would you highlight actionable thresholds (e.g., LTV:CAC < 2 or payback > 12 months)?

HardTechnical

0 practiced

Write a SQL query to produce a 12-month cohort retention summary from an events table: events(user_id int, event_date date, event_type text where 'payment' marks paying status). Define cohort by month of first payment and compute for each cohort the percentage of that cohort that made a payment in month 0..11 after signup. Output cohort_month and twelve retention columns.

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

Explain what the LTV:CAC ratio represents. Given LTV = 600 USD and CAC = 200 USD, evaluate whether acquisition is healthy and list three caveats you would check before recommending increased acquisition spending.

HardTechnical

0 practiced

Design a prioritized analytics plan to evaluate the ROI of a major marketing campaign that spent 2M USD and targeted three channels. What data would you need, how would you attribute conversions, how would you compute incremental revenue and LTV from the campaign, and what statistical tests would you run to assess significance?

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

You notice a gradual increase in churn for customers acquired via Channel Q over the past 6 months. Describe an analysis plan to determine whether churn increase is driven by product changes, channel quality, cohort seasonality, or data/attribution issues. Include at least five specific queries or visualizations you would run.

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