Analytical Fundamentals & Business Statistics
This area establishes whether you can reason from data with discipline. Expect practical questions on distributions, confidence intervals, experiment interpretation, and metric design. Interviewers favor clarity over jargon—be precise, explain assumptions, and tie analysis to decisions.
Be ready to go over:
- Metric design and guardrails: Defining KPIs, north-star metrics, and diagnostic sub-metrics
- Experimentation basics: A/B setup, power, significance, common pitfalls (peeking, novelty)
- Causal vs. correlational thinking: When to run experiments vs. observational analysis
- Advanced concepts (less common): Heterogeneous treatment effects, CUPED, uplift modeling, time-series anomalies
Example questions or scenarios:
- "How would you define activation for Acrobat, and what leading indicators predict retention?"
- "You ran an A/B test that’s directionally positive but not significant—what next?"
- "A key KPI moved; walk us through how you’d debug it from hypothesis to root cause."
SQL, Data Wrangling, and Python
You will be asked to write SQL live and reason about data quality. Python shows up in assessments focused on file parsing, preprocessing, and sanity checks—especially with CSVs or semi-structured data.
Be ready to go over:
- Core SQL: Joins, window functions, aggregations, CTEs, conditional logic
- Data hygiene: Handling nulls, deduplication, late-arriving facts, and schema changes
- Python workflows: Pandas for joins/groupbys, basic I/O, simple transformations
- Advanced concepts (less common): Query optimization, partitioning, UDF tradeoffs, incremental pipelines
Example questions or scenarios:
- "Write a query to compute 7-day retention by cohort and flag cohorts below a threshold."
- "Process a large CSV to generate weekly product metrics; discuss validation steps."
- "Given event tables with mixed timestamps, align sessions and compute conversion accurately."
Business Intelligence & Visualization (Power BI emphasis)
Adobe teams rely on durable BI assets to democratize insights. You’ll be evaluated on dashboard architecture, visual best practices, DAX modeling, and operational know-how such as report refreshes and scheduled distributions.
Be ready to go over:
- Data modeling: Star schemas, relationships, measures vs. calculated columns
- Design principles: Visual hierarchy, preattentive attributes, accessibility
- Governance & operations: Dataset refresh, report scheduling, permissions, documentation
- Advanced concepts (less common): Row-level security, composite models, performance analyzer
Example questions or scenarios:
- "How would you model a subscriptions dataset with plans, invoices, and usage events in Power BI?"
- "Which DAX functions do you use for cohort retention and rolling windows?"
- "Describe how you’d schedule and monitor weekly exec reports safely."