Behavioral Mastery for Engineering Leaders
Failure and Growth Narratives: Turning Setbacks into Strengths
"Tell me about a time you failed." This question appears in nearly every EM interview loop. It is also the question candidates handle worst. Most either minimize the failure, blame external factors, or describe something so trivial it does not count. The strongest candidates treat failure questions as an opportunity to demonstrate the quality hiring committees value above all others: self-awareness.
What Interviewers Really Assess with Failure Questions
Failure questions are not about the failure itself. They are a proxy for three leadership traits:
- Self-awareness -- Do you understand your own weaknesses, blind spots, and decision-making patterns? Leaders who lack self-awareness repeat the same mistakes and create toxic team dynamics.
- Accountability -- Do you own the outcome, or do you deflect? Panels listen carefully for language that shifts blame to circumstances, other people, or "the organization."
- Growth mindset -- A concept developed by Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck in her 2006 book Mindset, the growth mindset is the belief that abilities can be developed through effort and learning. Interviewers want to see that failure changed your behavior permanently, not just temporarily.
The Productive Failure Framework
Structure every failure story using three phases:
Phase 1: What Happened
State the failure clearly and without hedging. Name your role in it. Include enough context for the interviewer to understand the stakes, but do not over-explain the circumstances.
Weak: "The project was delayed because of unclear requirements." Strong: "I underestimated the integration complexity and committed the team to a deadline that turned out to be unrealistic. We delivered three weeks late, which pushed back the marketing launch."
Phase 2: What You Learned
Describe the specific insight you gained. The best learning statements are precise and personal -- not generic platitudes like "I learned to communicate better."
Weak: "I learned that communication is important." Strong: "I learned that I had a pattern of optimizing for speed over thoroughness in estimation. I was treating engineering estimates as targets rather than ranges, and I was not accounting for integration risk with systems my team had never touched."
Phase 3: What Changed Permanently
This is where most candidates stop short. Interviewers want to hear about systemic change, not just personal reflection. What did you put in place so the same category of failure would not recur?
Weak: "I started being more careful with estimates." Strong: "I introduced a pre-commitment review process where we spend one sprint doing a technical spike before locking any deadline with stakeholders. My team still uses this process two years later, and we have not missed a committed deadline since."
Common EM Failure Themes
Prepare at least one story from each of these themes. They cover the most frequent failure areas interviewers probe:
| Failure Theme | What It Tests | Story Should Demonstrate |
|---|---|---|
| Bad hire | Judgment, hiring process rigor | How you improved your hiring rubric or interview process |
| Missed deadline | Estimation, stakeholder management | How you changed your planning or commitment process |
| Team morale crisis | Emotional intelligence, early detection | How you built better feedback loops or check-in systems |
| Technical debt explosion | Prioritization, long-term thinking | How you balanced delivery pressure with sustainability |
| Failed project | Decision-making, knowing when to stop | How you built kill criteria or pivot decision frameworks |
Example: The Bad Hire Story
"Six months into a scaling push, I hired a senior engineer who looked strong on paper and performed well in interviews, but was a poor cultural fit. They were technically excellent but dismissive of junior engineers and resistant to code review. I spent two months trying to coach the behavior, but I was too slow to act. By the time I made the call to part ways, two junior engineers had already requested transfers.
I learned that I had over-indexed on technical signal in my hiring rubric and had no structured evaluation for collaboration and mentorship. I redesigned our interview loop to include a pair-programming round with a junior team member and added explicit collaboration criteria to our scorecard. In the 18 months since, we have made 11 hires with zero cultural misfires."
The Anti-Patterns: What to Avoid
Hiring committees are trained to spot these patterns. Any one of them can turn a failure story from a strength into a red flag:
Anti-Pattern 1: Blaming Others
Red flag language: "The product manager kept changing requirements." "My skip-level did not give me enough support." "The other team dropped the ball."
The fix: Even if others contributed to the failure, focus on your decisions and your actions. You can acknowledge context without deflecting.
Anti-Pattern 2: Minimizing the Failure
Red flag language: "It was not really a failure, more of a learning experience." "In hindsight, it worked out fine."
The fix: Call it what it was. Panels respect honesty and lose trust when candidates reframe failures as successes.
Anti-Pattern 3: Showing No Learning
Red flag language: "These things happen in fast-moving environments." "Sometimes you just get unlucky."
The fix: Every failure has a lesson. If you genuinely cannot identify what you would do differently, the interviewer will conclude you have not reflected deeply enough -- or worse, that you would repeat the mistake.
Anti-Pattern 4: Choosing a Trivial Failure
Red flag language: "One time I forgot to update a Jira ticket..." "I once showed up late to a meeting..."
The fix: Choose a failure with real stakes -- a project that failed, a person you let down, a decision that cost money or time. Trivial examples signal that you are either hiding your real failures or have not been in situations with enough responsibility.
Calibrating the Right Level of Vulnerability
The best failure stories hit a sweet spot: serious enough to demonstrate real stakes and genuine learning, but not so catastrophic that the interviewer questions your overall judgment. A good rule of thumb: choose a failure where the permanent change you made demonstrates that you are now a stronger leader because of the experience.
Your failure story should leave the interviewer thinking: "This person has been through hard situations, they learned from them, and they built systems to prevent recurrence. I want that kind of leader on my team."
Next, we will explore cross-functional influence -- how to demonstrate leadership across product, design, and executive stakeholders without formal authority. :::