“How Do You Handle Feedback or Criticism?”

Freelance taught me the wrong version of this first, so I'll be honest about that. When you're paid per project, feedback feels like a threat to the invoice, and for my first couple of years I defended work I should have just changed.

The turn was a rebrand where the client kept saying the logo felt cold. I explained the reasoning three separate times, which is a polite way of saying I ignored them three times. On the fourth pass I finally asked what they wanted a customer to feel walking in, and it turned out they had a specific thing in mind — their old hand-painted sign — that had never come up because I'd never asked. The version we shipped came out of a fifteen-minute conversation I could have had a month earlier. Now my first move on any note is to ask what it's protecting before I decide whether I disagree, and I say the note back in my own words so we find out early if I've misread it.

The thing I actually want from an in-house role is the feedback getting faster and less polite. A weekly critique where someone tells me the layout isn't working in the first ten minutes is worth more to me than a client being careful with my feelings for a month.