Learning from Mistakes: A Consultant's Perspective

Introduction

Everyone makes mistakes, including consultants who advise other people on how to avoid them. What separates a useful consultant from a defensive one is whether they'll actually talk about their own mistakes instead of just other people's. Here's a small one, on our own site, and what it actually taught.

Why Mistakes Are Worth Talking About

A mistake a consultant has actually made and fixed is worth more to a client than a hypothetical best practice pulled from a checklist. It's specific, it's real, and it comes with the actual consequences attached — which makes the advice that follows more credible, not less.

The Mistake

On our own site, selecting "Services" from the mobile navigation menu didn't collapse the menu afterward — it stayed open, covering the page underneath. Small bug, but it broke the one thing navigation is supposed to do cleanly: get out of the way once you've used it.

Why It Stuck

Mistakes you catch on your own product tend to stick harder than ones you only hear about secondhand. This one was a clear reminder that mobile navigation states need to be tested explicitly, not assumed to work because the desktop version does — a lesson now built into how we check client sites, not just our own.

Turning It Into Something Useful

Fixing the bug was the easy part. The more useful outcome was adding "does the mobile menu actually close after a selection" to the standard review checklist — a specific, testable item that came directly from catching the mistake, not from a generic UX guideline.

Better On Our Site First

The real upside is where this happened: our own site, not a client's. Catching it here, before it showed up in someone else's launch, is exactly what ongoing quality control is supposed to do — find the problem before it costs someone else.

Conclusion

A consultant who only talks about other people's mistakes is selling theory. One who talks about their own — specifically, concretely, including what changed afterward — is showing their actual process. This bug wasn't dramatic, but the habit it built into our review process is one every client's project benefits from now.

Tyrone Showers