"Earlier in my career, I worked for a fintech startup and was asked to build a predictive financial model that forecasted sales for the next three years. A year later, it became apparent that my model wasn't as accurate as I had hoped. After taking a deep dive and investigating why my model was off, it became clear that I had made some false assumptions when it came to the sales cycle and how quickly our salespeople could close larger clients. I learned a valuable lesson about making sure to talk to all stakeholders during the planning stage of a financial model. If I had better understood the sales cycle in advance it would have allowed for my model to be more accurate. Since then I have made sure to more thoroughly research and talk to all important parties prior to building a model."