Tell me about a time when you had a conflict with your manager and you were wrong

Early in my first year, I was finishing a small feature and my manager asked me to add basic monitoring and one more round of edge-case testing before release. I pushed back because the feature looked straightforward and I thought the extra work would just delay us. In our follow-up, I asked what risk they were seeing, and they explained that similar changes had been hard to diagnose once they hit production because failures only showed up for a small set of users. They were right; when I tested more carefully, I found a case I had missed. I updated the code, added the monitoring, and sent a revised release plan so we could ship safely a day later. After that, I got into the habit of asking earlier what failure modes mattered most instead of assuming a change was low risk because it seemed small to me.

At my previous job I was asked to implement a CSV export for a customer-facing reports page. I argued with my manager that we should build a generic export service so future formats would be easy, because I hate duplicating code. My manager pushed back: customers needed CSV today and the deadline was tight, so he wanted a simple focused endpoint we could ship. He was right — my insistence would have delayed the release and added unnecessary complexity for a near-term need. I admitted I was wrong, implemented the simple export, and then proposed a small follow-up task with clear cost estimates to factor out shared code later. I learned to balance good design with practical delivery and to present trade-offs with estimated effort instead of assuming my preferred approach is best.