Data Science & Analytics Topics
Statistical analysis, data analytics, big data technologies, and data visualization. Covers statistical methods, exploratory analysis, and data storytelling.
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.
Business Intelligence Background
A summary of business intelligence experience including the BI platforms and tools used, types of dashboards and reports built, data volumes and sources, analytical methods, stakeholder consumption patterns, and measurable business outcomes. Candidates should explain how BI efforts influenced decisions, examples of ETL or modeling work, and any leadership or ownership of BI initiatives.
Analytical Background
The candidate's analytical skills and experience with data driven problem solving, including statistics, data analysis projects, tools and languages used, and examples of insights that influenced product or business decisions. This covers academic projects, internships, or professional analytics work and the end to end approach from hypothesis to measured result.
Communicating Statistical Results to Business Stakeholders
Translating statistical findings into actionable business language. Explaining confidence, risk, and decision frameworks to non-technical audiences. Presenting trade-offs and uncertainties honestly. Building trust through clear communication.
Dashboard and Data Visualization Design
Principles and practices for designing, prototyping, and implementing visual artifacts and interactive dashboards that surface insights and support decision making. Topics include information architecture and layout, chart and visual encoding selection for comparisons trends distributions and relationships, annotation and labeling, effective use of color and white space, and trade offs between overview and detail. The topic covers interactive patterns such as filters drill downs tooltips and bookmarks and decision frameworks for when interactivity adds user value versus complexity. It also encompasses translating analytic questions into metrics grouping related measures, wireframing and prototyping, performance and data latency considerations for large data sets, accessibility and mobile responsiveness, data integrity and maintenance, and how statistical concepts such as statistical significance confidence intervals and effect sizes influence visualization choices.
Operational Metrics and Monitoring
Covers selection, measurement, visualization, and interpretation of operational metrics used to manage systems and processes. Candidates should show understanding of what to measure, how to instrument and collect data, how to design dashboards and reports, and how to interpret trends and signals to guide operational decisions. Includes familiarity with common key performance indicators, defining success criteria, recognizing when new metrics are needed, and using metrics to prioritize work or detect regressions. At more junior levels, demonstrate comfort with reading dashboards and proposing metric improvements; at senior levels, show metric strategy and measurement design.
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.