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Welcome to the Exponent BizOps Course!

BizOps (or Strategy and Ops, Business Operations, etc.) teams have high leverage for driving change.

Expectations are high and the skillset is advanced. As you might imagine, the interview process is tough.

You might be a fresh graduate or a consultant looking for a change. You may already work in bizops under a different title like "Program Manager." Or you may be a research scientist, founder of a startup, or an ex-Chief-of-Staff... Whatever your job is now, if you're interested in solving complex, high-impact problems, bizops is a great fit.

We designed this course with the help strategy and bizops hiring managers from Google, HP, LinkedIn, and more. Over the next few modules, we'll review the basics of the core bizops skillset, teach you what hiring managers are looking for, and give you real-world interview questions to practice and learn from.

As an Exponent member, you'll receive access to even more resources, including discussion groups, mock interviews, and regular content updates.

Goals of This Course

By the end of the course, you should be able to:

  • Understand what's evaluated in a typical bizops interview loop.
  • Answer interview questions about data, metrics, strategy, team dynamics, and project management with ease.
  • Create a rich story bank based on your past experiences for behavioral interviews.

How to Get the Most Out of the Course

Generally, bizops interviews assess these core competencies:

Data Skills

BizOps is often called in to solve complex problems without clear answers. Tons of data analysis happens before recommendations are made, often requiring complex database manipulation and data cleaning. It falls to bizops to pull together and shape data, draw insights, test, and confirm hypotheses.

Problem-solving and Strategic Decision-making

"From all the possible decisions we as a company might make -- which are the best options and why? And how do we get there?" BizOps teams take ambiguous problems, scope them down into solvable chunks, and create actionable projects. Top-shelf problem-solving, communication, and strategic decision-making skills are required at every step.

Stakeholder Management

BizOps partners with many different functions. Communicating up to management and down/across to team members and cross-functional partners effectively is key to success.

Project Management

Because bizops works on bleeding-edge initiatives, they often manage their own projects. Project management skills may be more or less important depending on the specific job description, but all bizops folks must show that they know how to set up a project for success and that they’ll be able to identify and address any issues that come up.

We've organized this course into these same categories to make preparation straightforward.

We recommend starting with a few questions from each section to get a sense of your strengths and weaknesses, and then making your way through sections of the course that are most relevant to your target role.

Tip: If you're already in strategy and/or bizops, feel free to skip this intro module and jump right into course content starting with the data skills module.

For practice questions, we recommend recording your own answer first, and then comparing your response against our solutions. Remember, there’s usually no “correct” answer in bizops interviewing, but you should be able to identify ways to improve the structure and content of your response with practice.

Lastly, we're excited to have you with us! Join us in the Exponent Slack group where you can share ideas, questions, and feedback as you go through this course.

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