Tell me about a time when you changed your mind about something important

On a recent feature, I was convinced we should add caching right away because the page felt slow in my local testing, and I thought that would make the launch safer. A teammate asked me to first check whether the slowdown was actually happening with realistic data, so I ran a small test and found most of the time was coming from one unnecessary request, not repeated computation. That changed my mind because adding caching would have made the code more complex without solving the main problem. We removed the extra request instead, and the page became fast enough with much simpler code. The part I took away was to measure the real bottleneck before optimizing, and I've used that approach on later tasks too.

At my last job in retail operations, I was sure the best way to reduce mistakes was to add a more detailed checklist for the team before each store opening. I had seen a few missed steps, so I thought the answer was to make the process tighter and more formal. After watching the team for a week, I realized the real issue was that the checklist itself was too long for the busy morning rush, so people were rushing through it or skipping parts entirely. That changed my mind because I saw that adding more rules was actually making the problem worse. I helped shorten the checklist and grouped the most important tasks at the top, and the number of misses dropped. What I learned was to look at how people actually work before deciding that a process needs more steps.