Data Science & Analytics Topics
Statistical analysis, data analytics, big data technologies, and data visualization. Covers statistical methods, exploratory analysis, and data storytelling.
Data Driven Decision Making
Using metrics and analytics to inform operational and strategic decisions. Topics include defining and interpreting operational measures such as throughput cycle time error rates resource utilization cost per unit quality measures and on time delivery, as well as growth and lifecycle metrics across acquisition activation retention and revenue. Emphasis is on building audience segmented dashboards and reports presenting insights to influence stakeholders diagnosing problems through variance analysis and performance analytics identifying bottlenecks measuring campaign effectiveness and guiding resource allocation and investment decisions. Also covers how metric expectations change with seniority and how to shape organizational metric strategy and scorecards to drive accountability.
Metrics Analysis and Data Driven Problem Solving
Skills for using quantitative metrics to diagnose and solve product or support problems. Candidates should be able to identify relevant key performance indicators such as customer satisfaction, response time, resolution rate, and first contact resolution, detect anomalies and trends, formulate and prioritize hypotheses about root causes, design experiments and controlled tests to validate hypotheses, perform cohort and time series analysis, evaluate statistical significance and practical impact, and implement and monitor data backed solutions. This also includes instrumentation and data collection best practices, dashboarding and visualization to surface insights, trade off analysis when balancing multiple metrics, and communicating findings and recommended changes to cross functional stakeholders.
Analytics and Dashboarding
Designing, building, and enabling dashboards and spreadsheet based analysis to turn data into actionable insights for different stakeholder audiences. Candidates should be able to define and prioritize key performance indicators and metrics for roles such as sales, marketing, finance, and executives; apply dashboard design principles that present complex data clearly; and enable self service analytics through reusable data models, standardized metrics, documentation, and user training. Practical spreadsheet skills are included: advanced formulas, pivot tables, lookup functions, data cleaning, filtering, charting, sensitivity and what if analysis, and performance optimization. Candidates should also speak to tools and platforms used such as Excel, Google Sheets, business intelligence platforms, visualization tools, and analytics platforms; consider refresh cadence, data validation and governance, interactivity and drill down patterns, and trade offs between standardized reporting and bespoke custom views.
Data Interpretation & Dashboard Literacy
Practice interpreting data visualizations, trend lines, and metric dashboards. Develop ability to identify what's noteworthy (seasonality, anomalies, correlations) vs. normal variation. Think about causation vs. correlation. Practice explaining what a metric trend means in business terms and what actions it might suggest.
Data Analysis and Insight Generation
Ability to convert raw data into clear, evidence based business insights and prioritized recommendations. Candidates should demonstrate end to end analytical thinking including data cleaning and validation, exploratory analysis, summary statistics, distributions, aggregations, pivot tables, time series and trend analysis, segmentation and cohort analysis, anomaly detection, and interpretation of relationships between metrics. This topic covers hypothesis generation and validation, basic statistical testing, controlled experiments and split testing, sensitivity and robustness checks, and sense checking results against domain knowledge. It emphasizes connecting metrics to business outcomes, defining success criteria and measurement plans, synthesizing quantitative and qualitative evidence, and prioritizing recommendations based on impact feasibility risk and dependencies. Practical communication skills are assessed including charting dashboards crafting concise narratives and tailoring findings to non technical and technical stakeholders, along with documenting next steps experiments and how outcomes will be measured.
Data Investigation and Root Cause Analysis
Techniques and a structured process for diagnosing metric changes and anomalies using quantitative evidence complemented by qualitative signals. Candidates should demonstrate how to validate that an observed change is a real signal and not noise or a reporting or instrumentation problem by checking data quality, event counts, sampling, and pipeline integrity. Describe slicing and decomposition strategies such as cohort segmentation, geography and platform segmentation, feature level analysis, time series decomposition to separate trend and seasonality, funnel and velocity analysis, retention analysis, and variance analysis. Explain how to form, prioritize, and test hypotheses; design diagnostic queries and tests using structured query language; and correlate metric changes with product releases, experiments, marketing activity, or external events. Include how to combine quantitative findings with qualitative research such as user interviews, session replay, logs, and support tickets to strengthen causal inference. Finally, cover communicating concise findings and actionable recommendations to stakeholders, creating reproducible queries and monitoring dashboards or alerts, and mentoring junior analysts on a systematic investigation approach.
Quantitative Analysis and Metrics Interpretation
Core skills for working with numeric business data: calculating and interpreting key metrics, comparing options numerically, identifying trends and anomalies, performing variance checks, and testing assumptions. Includes reading dashboards and query results, extracting meaningful insights from revenue and operational metrics, segmenting data, identifying outliers, and understanding what metrics indicate about business performance. Candidates should be comfortable stating and justifying assumptions, performing simple break even and cost benefit reasoning, and translating numbers into prioritized actions or follow up analyses. This topic covers cross functional metric types from sales and operations to product and marketing, and emphasizes structured thinking, correct metric definitions, basic descriptive statistics, and how to use data to support recommendations.
Data Problem Solving and Business Context
Practical data oriented problem solving that connects business questions to correct, robust analyses. Includes translating business questions into queries and metric definitions, designing SQL or query logic for edge cases, handling data quality issues such as nulls duplicates and inconsistent dates, validating assumptions, and producing metrics like retention and churn. Emphasizes building queries and pipelines that are resilient to real world data issues, thinking through measurement definitions, and linking data findings to business implications and possible next steps.
Excel and Structured Query Language
Assesses practical data analysis ability using spreadsheet software and structured query language. Candidates should demonstrate comfort with spreadsheet features such as formulas, pivot tables, lookup and aggregation functions, data cleaning and tabular modeling, and creating charts and executive ready summaries. For structured query language, candidates should be able to write queries that join tables, filter and aggregate data, compute running and windowed metrics, and perform cohort or funnel analyses; they should also understand extract transform and load workflows and how to extract sales data from customer relationship management systems or data warehouses. Interview tasks typically include writing queries or spreadsheet formulas to compute pipeline health, conversion rates, ramp estimates and other sales metrics.