Can you recall a time when you received challenging feedback? What made it difficult for you to receive? To what extent did you agree with it?

Question

Anonymous · Accepted Answer

At Center Card, where I served as Director of Technology in a fast-paced startup
environment, I made the decision to deploy the ELK stack (Elasticsearch,
Logstash, Kibana) on Kubernetes. Initially, everything was running smoothly, but
a node replacement in the ELK cluster caused Elasticsearch to crash in our
staging environment—just weeks before our production launch.
The incident put significant stress on the infrastructure team, and we didn't
have deep in-house expertise to handle such issues. My CTO expressed
disappointment and gave me direct feedback to ensure that similar disruptions
would not happen again.
It was difficult feedback to hear, but I fully agreed with it. I realized that I
had underestimated the operational complexity of managing ELK on Kubernetes
without the right support or expertise.
In response, I took immediate corrective action—working closely with my team,
often around the clock, to migrate to a managed Elasticsearch solution. This
decision helped us stabilize the environment and stay on track for launch.
The key lesson I learned was that as a leader, I must assess not only the
technical feasibility of a solution but also whether the team has the capacity
and skills to support it. If not, it's critical either to choose a safer, more
manageable alternative or to invest in upskilling the team before proceeding

Anonymous · Answer

At Center card, as a director of technology in a startup - I once made the
decision deploy ELK on Kubernets. All was going well until one of the nodes in
ELK was swapped -this caused Elastic search to go down in stage and we were few
weeks to going producion. This put a lot of stress on the infra team and I did
not have the experts to handle this - my CTO was not happy and asked me to
ensure that things like this does not happen again. I realized that I had under
estimated the complexity of managing such systems. I took corrective actions
worked days and nights with my team to migrate to manager elastic search and
could avert the delay. The lesson I learnt was that as a leader i have to access
if my team is ready to take on challenges, if not either go with safer option or
else give me proper training to be SME.

Anonymous · Answer

Honestly speaking I have generally received very positive feedback for last few
years getting maximum result: Role Model for my behavior and Demonstrating for
Results. I know that I was marked by my manager as strategic for group and top
performer. I also constantly got highest evaluation from the team within ESS
having (~95%) But I’m always opened for any feedback and I always seek feedback
asking manager, peers, stakeholders and the team members. There was one
situation where engineer shared a feedback that he need more clear path for dev
to be promote to mid level. I try to monitor such situation reagularly, but in
this case he was a person who was a little behind with the tech skills vs
others. I started working closely with him, clarifying what should be changed,
what he should do to improve and be promoted. At the end he was promoted

Can you recall a time when you received challenging feedback? What made it difficult for you to receive? To what extent did you agree with it?

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