What are the core responsibilities of a data analyst in a business team?
A data analyst sits between the systems that produce data and the people who make decisions. The role is far wider than writing queries: it covers clarifying what is actually being asked, guaranteeing the numbers are correct, and making sure the answer changes what someone does.
Requirements and framing — interrogate the request, agree the metric definition and the decision it supports, and push back on questions the data cannot answer.
Data preparation and quality — source from the system of record, clean and validate, reconcile to known totals, and own the refresh so recurring reports do not quietly rot.
Analysis and insight — profile and segment the data, test hypotheses, and separate a real signal from noise, seasonality or a data-quality artefact.
Reporting and self-service — build dashboards and semantic models that others can use without asking, with clear definitions baked into the model rather than living in someone's head.
Communication and governance — document metric definitions and assumptions, present to non-technical audiences, and keep one agreed version of each number across teams.
Key terms: requirements gathering, system of record, reconciliation, semantic model, self-service, metric definition, data governance, stakeholder management
Structure the answer around the flow of work — clarify, prepare, analyse, deliver, maintain — and attach one concrete example to each, because a list of nouns sounds rehearsed. The two responsibilities candidates underplay are data-quality ownership and metric governance, and those are exactly what distinguishes an analyst from someone who writes queries on request.
Expect the follow-up "what takes most of your time?" — answering honestly (cleaning and requirements clarification, not modelling) reads as experience rather than weakness. Do not describe the role as purely reactive; mention proactively spotting issues and proposing questions nobody asked.