Describe a situation where you received criticism

Early in my first internship, my mentor told me that my code reviews were hard to follow because my changes mixed bug fixes, refactoring, and formatting all in one submission. I initially thought the work itself was correct, but when he walked through one example, I saw that I was making it harder for others to review and support me. After that, I started breaking my work into smaller parts and adding a short summary of what changed and what I wanted feedback on. I also asked him to tell me if my next few reviews were still too hard to read. Within a couple of weeks he said they were much easier to review, and I noticed comments became more about the actual solution instead of asking me to reorganize everything.

At my second job at a small SaaS startup I was called out by our customer success lead for coming across as dismissive when customers reported bugs — I'd often reply "can't reproduce" without much follow-up. I was defensive at first, but I asked for examples and realized I wasn't putting in the effort to reproduce issues or explain what I had tried, which left customers and teammates frustrated. I started following a simple reproduction checklist, recording a quick screen capture when I couldn't reproduce locally, and including exact environment details and next steps in my replies, plus a short note acknowledging the user's frustration. I also invited the customer success rep to sit in on a few debugging sessions so we could align on expectations. Within a month we had fewer escalations and the rep told me customers appreciated the clearer updates and that trust between teams improved.