In this module10 lessons
Failure and mistakes
Pick a real failure, own it in your first sentence and spend most of the answer on what you did next, including weakness and feedback questions.
7 min readFull kit
Why they ask about failure
Anyone who has shipped real products has failed at something. So "Tell me about a time you failed" isn't a trap to catch the one candidate who has. It tests three things at once:
- Honesty. Do you own it, or does the failure turn out to be someone else's?
- Judgment. Do you understand why it happened, at the level of your own decisions?
- Growth. Did you change how you work, and can you show it?
A candidate who claims no real failures signals either little experience or little self-awareness. Neither helps.
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Practice this lesson
- Tell me about a product or project that failed. What did you learn?
- Tell me about a mistake you made that affected customers.
- What is your greatest weakness?
- Tell me about a time you received critical feedback.
- Tell me about a time you missed a deadline.
- Tell me about a time you launched something quickly and then had to fix it.