Talk about your most notable mistake as a project manager. What would you change, if given the chance to do it over?

How to Answer
Answer Example

Regardless of your level of expertise or years of experience, you are allowed to fail. Be truthful; describe your mistake to the interviewer and briefly explain why it happened. A successful answer will emphasize your learnings, and what you have done since the failure to avoid repeating it. Own the error and explain how you resolved it.

"When I was starting out as a project manager, I was assigned to implement a customer relationship management (CRM) tool for the company's marketing and sales teams. During the selection phase, leadership was wowed by this one tool because of how robust it was. Further, it was a very popular CRM used by our biggest competitors. The selection was done exclusively by the leadership team, with little representation from the people at sales and marketing who would become the end-users of the CRM. Leadership asked to do a 30-day trial, but there were no clear testing guidelines. It seemed like we just wanted to be on-trend with our competitors, but I was scared to play devil's advocate. In the end, we were paying 100% for a tool when we needed only 60% of its functionality.

After that project, I learned to contribute more in the initiation phase of a project. I think that if I had spoken out about my concerns, we could have taken a bit more time during the selection process and get a better understanding of the business needs. Now, when I get assigned a similar project, I always ask to do a thorough review of providers. I've also created a list of guidelines in which we take a lot of factors into consideration, not just organization-centric factors, but more importantly customer-centric ones."

Next Question

How to Answer: Talk about your most notable mistake as a project manager. What would you change, if given the chance to do it over?

Advice and answer examples written specifically for a Technical Project Manager job interview.

2. Talk about your most notable mistake as a project manager. What would you change, if given the chance to do it over?

How to Answer

Regardless of your level of expertise or years of experience, you are allowed to fail. Be truthful; describe your mistake to the interviewer and briefly explain why it happened. A successful answer will emphasize your learnings, and what you have done since the failure to avoid repeating it. Own the error and explain how you resolved it.

Written by M Cheryl Harkins on July 6th, 2021

Answer Example

"When I was starting out as a project manager, I was assigned to implement a customer relationship management (CRM) tool for the company's marketing and sales teams. During the selection phase, leadership was wowed by this one tool because of how robust it was. Further, it was a very popular CRM used by our biggest competitors. The selection was done exclusively by the leadership team, with little representation from the people at sales and marketing who would become the end-users of the CRM. Leadership asked to do a 30-day trial, but there were no clear testing guidelines. It seemed like we just wanted to be on-trend with our competitors, but I was scared to play devil's advocate. In the end, we were paying 100% for a tool when we needed only 60% of its functionality.

After that project, I learned to contribute more in the initiation phase of a project. I think that if I had spoken out about my concerns, we could have taken a bit more time during the selection process and get a better understanding of the business needs. Now, when I get assigned a similar project, I always ask to do a thorough review of providers. I've also created a list of guidelines in which we take a lot of factors into consideration, not just organization-centric factors, but more importantly customer-centric ones."

Written by M Cheryl Harkins on July 6th, 2021

Next Question