[Link] is the kind of BA that you (or your management) want in the team?

— A domain specialist
OR a techno-functional specialist OR someone who has great people skills. Would that person fit into
your existing team culture? Do you want to bring a bit of variety in your team? If you are not sure of
these, please check with your manager.

[Link] that person get work done? — Being a BA is all about being organized, being self-motivated
and delivering results. At times, even if the skills are lacking, you have to make sure the person in the
interview is someone who can deliver results.

Describe a day, a week and a month of your life as a business analyst

— gives a practical insight into the experience of the candidate. One, it gives a very clear view about
the daily tasks done by the candidate (which is sometimes difficult to know from the CV) and two, it
gives a possible measure of fit into your organization.

Have you faced challenges dealing with developers and testers? If so, how did you solve them

— gives an insight into their stakeholder (internal) management capability.

What do you do if you found out that the feature that your team implemented caused a major issue
in production?

— fire-fighting skills. Were they leading the initiative to find out the problems and set things right OR
just a passive bystander?

How do you convince a different development team to solve a dependency for your team if their
backlog is already full?

— experience of inter team collaboration. This is a problem not easy to solve, and if they have
experienced it and found a way, it’s a good thing.

What are the best ways to build consensus amongst different stakeholders? Provide examples in
which you had to convince people from different streams to agree to a solution

— consensus building and negotiation skills. Can they be decisive but smartly? Most people would
yes, they can. But you got to figure this out by examples and the how they talk about it.

What are the ways in which you did root cause analysis (RCA) for any failure (with examples)?

— Tests the experience of the candidate in doing RCA.

What is your testing strategy while doing acceptance tests for a feature/product?

— To get an idea about the testing tasks done by the BA

Did you have to travel abroad to meet customers for workshops or discovery sessions. How was your
experience?

— Gives an insight into an experience working face to face with international clients. Again, this
question is really important if your clients are mostly international.

What are some of the innovation topics that you have worked upon in your previous organization?

— Testing the innovation mindset. Some candidates would just blank out. Some would just talk
about random cool stuff like blockchain etc. The one who has created a prototype out of some
innovative idea (or taken it far enough) is someone you want (if you are really meaning to innovate
in your own company).

How assertive are you? Rate yourself

— Generally, people give quite frank answer to these kinds of questions. Opportunity to understand
the level of assertiveness that the person has, and how they use it.

How adaptable are you to new streams of work? Rate yourself

— Generally, people give quite frank answer to this question. Opportunity to understand if the
individual can adapt to changing work ecosystems.

How would you feel about constantly re-engineering components to understand them?

— Ask this if your team has a lot of components which is poorly documented. And you expect your
BA to make sense of them.

How do you build an app like uber/Netflix/trivago/gaps (or any suitable example, preferably an
unknown product so that they start fresh in their thinking)?

— To test if the candidate can describe the critical parts and interfaces that make a product. Ask
them to whiteboard and explain the moving parts. One, it gives clarity on their presentation skills.
Two, you can judge if they are able to retain your interest during their explanation.

How would you improve an existing product (what’s app, uber, payment gateway for an eCommerce
platform etc)?

— Testing the thinking process. Don’t look for brilliant ideas, but look for original thoughts and a
clear-thinking framework. See if their basics are correct when talking about system integration,
system design, data issues etc.

Have you had a chance to design any API from scratch (could be edifact, XML, JSON etc)?

— To test their knowledge and experience of working with APIs.

What are the pros and cons of microservices architectural style?

— To check their awareness of service-oriented architecture.

How do you see cloud computing impacting your domain going forward?

— Does the candidate know in-depth about the impacts of cloud computing to their domain.

What are some of the new tools or technical topics that you are learning now?

— To see if they are someone who constantly tries to learn new stuff.

How do you decide which projects are suitable for agile and which are not?

— To test the knowledge of agile and challenges associated with it.

What were the challenges that you faced in writing functional specs in agile?
— Test the experiences of the BA in agile

Did you get a chance to estimate efforts for a project or an epic (in agile)? What was the process that
you used?

— To see if they have done effort estimation and faced challenges.

If the agile team is constantly not able to complete user stories, what would you do to solve it?

— Checking troubleshooting skills within team.

What has been the driving force for you to pursue a career in business analysis

— Pretty straightforward question to determine why they ended up being an analyst.

What is your personal motto or your personal driving force?

— To find out their individual perspective about work.

What do you do to unwind after work?

— See if they can maintain some distinction between work and beyond. This gives a chance for them
to talk about their hobbies.

How do you see the role of business analysis evolving in the next 2–3 years

— The answer gives an idea about the thinking that the BA has for his role.

Do you want to specialize as a client facing functional BA OR as a techno-functional systems analyst?

— If you want a BA to be involved heavily in pre-sales activity, client discussions, customer process
mapping, U/X design heavy role: go for someone who identifies as the first type. If you want
someone who is very good with system design, functional architecture, technically proficient, able to
understand software architecture (functionally good as well): go for the second type.