Tell me about a time when a customer came to you for something that wouldn't actually address their need.

In an internship, a customer-facing teammate asked me to add a button that exported a whole page of data to a spreadsheet. Before I started, I asked how the customer was using that export, and we learned they were actually copying just two numbers into a daily email because they couldn't find them quickly in the product. I worked with my mentor to add a small summary section on the page instead of building a full export flow. We showed it to the teammate, and they confirmed it covered the customer's real need with much less effort. I also added a short note to our task tracker so if similar requests came in, we'd check the underlying workflow first.

At a small fintech where I was a junior engineer, a customer success rep asked me to remove a file-format validation because a client kept failing uploads. I reached out to the customer and ran through their workflow with them — they weren’t trying to bypass security, they had hundreds of tiny receipt images and needed a way to import them in bulk. Instead of turning off validation, I proposed and built a simple drag-and-drop uploader that zips and validates files client-side before sending, so the checks still ran but the user could batch their receipts. I paired with a senior engineer to make sure we stayed compliant with our data rules, and we shipped it as a small, low-risk improvement. The change cut similar support tickets by half and the customer was happy, and I also wrote a short note for support on how to triage future upload complaints.