Tell me about a time when you had to rebuild trust with stakeholders.

In my first year, I owned a small backend change that another teammate was depending on for a customer demo. I told them I was on track, but I had hit a problem and waited too long to ask for help because I thought I could still solve it myself. We missed the handoff, and they were frustrated because they had planned their demo around my update. After that, I spoke with them directly, acknowledged that my update had been too optimistic, and asked what would help them trust my status going forward. For the rest of that project, I sent short updates earlier, flagged blockers the same day, and only gave dates after checking them with a more experienced engineer. A few weeks later they stopped asking me for extra check-ins and started routing another small dependency through me, which told me the trust had come back.

At my last internship, I was helping the ops team update a weekly report that a few managers used to make staffing decisions. I made a formatting mistake in one of the numbers, and because I didn’t double-check it with the right person, the report went out with an incorrect trend line. One manager called it out in a meeting, and I could tell I’d lost some confidence because people started asking whether the whole report was reliable. I apologized directly, corrected the report the same day, and then wrote down a simple review step with the analyst I was supporting so we could both verify the key numbers before sending anything out. For the next few weeks I also sent a brief note explaining what changed and where I was still unsure, which helped people see I was being careful instead of trying to hide mistakes. By the end of the quarter, the same managers were comfortable asking me to own small updates again, and that mattered to me because I wanted to be seen as dependable, not just fast.