Tell me about a time when you received feedback that was difficult to hear. How did you react and 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

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

Tell me about a time when you received feedback that was difficult to hear. How did you react and did you agree with it?

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