Finance & Business Operations Topics
Financial management, budgeting, ROI analysis, and business operations. Covers financial forecasting, valuation, and operational metrics.
Vendor and Partner Relationship Management
Comprehensive end to end management of external vendors, suppliers, agencies, freelancers, and strategic partners. Candidates should be able to discuss vendor landscape assessment and segmentation, selection criteria, request for proposal processes, and total cost of ownership analysis. The topic covers procurement and contracting skills including contract negotiation, governance models, pricing and terms negotiation, escalation clauses, and establishing service level agreements and performance metrics. It includes operational practices for onboarding and integrating external providers, communication and governance cadences, expectation setting, supplier development and capability improvement, and ongoing performance monitoring, reviews, and dispute resolution. Candidates should also be able to evaluate tradeoffs between insourcing and external partnerships, approaches to consolidation versus diversification, criteria and processes for deepening, replacing, or offboarding vendors, and collaborating with vendors to drive innovation and align vendor relationships to strategic business and technology objectives.
Business Case Development and Financial Analysis
Skills and practices for building persuasive business cases and performing financial analysis to justify investments and prioritization. Topics include enumerating and estimating cost categories such as implementation, licensing, development, infrastructure, deployment and ongoing support; quantifying tangible benefits such as cost savings, revenue uplift, productivity improvements and efficiency gains; and accounting for intangible benefits such as risk reduction, flexibility and employee satisfaction. Financial techniques include total cost of ownership, simple return on investment, payback period, net present value using discounted cash flows, internal rate of return, lifecycle cost analysis and build versus buy comparisons. Candidates should be able to construct cash flow timelines, separate capital and operating expenses, perform sensitivity and scenario analysis, estimate ranges and confidence, model procurement and vendor tradeoffs, and state assumptions clearly. Practical communication skills include tailoring the financial narrative and level of detail for finance leaders, procurement partners, technical stakeholders and executive sponsors, showing break even and sensitivity charts, defining success metrics and timelines, and describing how to track and report realized outcomes after implementation.
Compensation Scenario Problem Solving
Practical case style problem solving for compensation situations such as conducting an annual compensation review, managing a pay equity audit, redesigning a department pay structure, resolving payout disputes, or assessing the cost and impact of program changes. Candidates are expected to frame the problem, identify data sources and validation steps, select appropriate analytical approaches, model cost and tradeoffs, propose prioritized options with business justification, create stakeholder and communication plans, and define metrics to measure success. Interviewers evaluate structured problem solving, quantitative reasoning, tradeoff analysis between equity and competitiveness, stakeholder influence, and implementation planning.
Scenario and Sensitivity Analysis
Techniques for designing executing and interpreting scenario and sensitivity analyses to understand how changes in assumptions affect financial outcomes. Coverage includes designing base case upside and downside scenarios one way and multi way sensitivity testing stress testing key drivers running variance analysis against budgets or forecasts and projecting how operational metric changes cascade through income statement balance sheet and cash flow. Candidates should be able to model business changes such as price increases volume shifts cost reductions or inventory adjustments state and justify assumptions perform contribution margin reasoning interpret variances and communicate limitations implications and recommended actions.
Compensation Modeling and Scenario Analysis
Covers the creation and interpretation of models that quantify the impact of compensation decisions. Candidates should be able to build scenario analyses that estimate the cost and distributional effects of salary increases bonus plan changes equity awards and rebanding and to perform sensitivity analysis across key assumptions. The topic includes budgeting forecasting and headcount modeling techniques as well as spreadsheet practices for transparent assumptions checks and validation. Strong answers explain how model outputs are used to inform stakeholder trade offs and to support clear recommendations.
Compensation Business Impact
Addresses how compensation design and decisions affect business outcomes and how to measure that impact. Topics include the relationship between pay and retention, hiring, motivation and productivity; the behavioral effects of incentive design; building metrics such as turnover by cohort, time to hire, and cost of vacancy; constructing a business case for compensation changes using cost estimates and return on investment reasoning; and partnering with finance and business stakeholders to align compensation to strategic goals.