3. Strengths, weaknesses and self-awareness

Strengths — pick 2–3 relevant to the role, each with proof:

"My strength is debugging production issues systematically. Last quarter I traced a recurring timeout to parameter sniffing in a stored procedure using Query Store, fixed it, and added monitoring — incidents for that service dropped to zero."

Weakness — real, not disqualifying for the role, and show what you are doing about it:

"I used to take on too much myself instead of delegating, because I wanted things done perfectly. It slowed the team down in one release. Since then I break work into tasks in Jira early, pair with juniors, and review instead of rewriting — our last sprint finished all committed stories."

Avoid clichés ("I'm a perfectionist", "I work too hard") and fatal weaknesses ("I miss deadlines", "I don't like teamwork").