Senior Strategy & Operations Manager Interview Experience

Can you walk me through your resume and background?

I walked through my background in analytics and strategy/ops type work and why that translated well to a role that sits between data, operators, and leadership. I framed myself as someone who can investigate what is going on in the business and then craft the story and recommendation off of it.

I said I was interested in the scope and pace, especially on the Eats side where the work is very operational and data-driven. The role felt like a fit because it mixes analytical problem solving with actually influencing decisions on things like growth, targeting, and spend.

Using the order and merchant data, what is the average number of orders per eater overall, per member, and per non-member for the week of April 11 to April 17?

The tricky part was not just counting orders. I had to make sure I was getting the right eater counts in the time window, then back into which of those eaters were members versus non-members before calculating averages. I used lower and upper date bounds plus member-status logic. It was straightforward once I set the logic up correctly, but it was easy to mix up eater count with order count.

Using the merchant and order data, which cuisine types and restaurants are performing best?

I handled most of it with pivot tables and some calculated fields, but I first checked whether merchant_id mapped one-to-one to cuisine type. That mattered a lot. Because it was one-to-one, I could use much simpler COUNTIF-style logic. If it had been one-to-many, I would have needed a more complex formula setup to account for merchants spanning multiple cuisine categories.

Please complete the full Excel analysis and submit your work product.

I organized every question into its own tab to make it easy to review and added visuals even though they did not ask for them. My hindsight is that you can always make the workbook more communicable and cleaner. The analysis tool itself can get busy, so anything that ranks results clearly or makes the answer more readable helps a lot.

I used a project where I could show real scale and quantified impact in roughly the $10M to $25M range. He let me talk through the analytical details for a bit, but he kept pushing on the so what. He wanted to know what changed in the business, where it stood now, and whether I could tie the work to an actual outcome instead of just a clean analysis. That felt very on-brand for them.

Restaurants are underperforming in a certain region. What is going on, and how would you look at it?

I started with the KPIs I would diagnose first, then when he steered me toward vendor throughput I said radius was one lever I would test. From there he pushed me into guardrails versus hero metrics. I said I would watch whether sales and take improved, but also guardrails like late deliveries and throughput so we do not create a short-term lift that hurts reorder behavior and goodwill. He was very quick with the yes-and-then-what style follow-ups.