Stop the blame, keep the learning - Natalia Romanska

Why your biggest professional mistakes might be your most valuable teachers

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"I can make mistakes. I will be doing mistakes in the future. That's not something that we can just skip and forget." - Natalia Romanska

In this episode, I talk with Natalia Romanska about why our biggest professional disasters often teach us more than our polished success stories. She shares how a 70,000 złoty accounting mistake early in her career forced her to develop the self-awareness that now guides her QA work—and why that painful learning stuck harder than any training ever could. We dig into the uncomfortable truth that testers rarely talk about: the gap between knowing we should learn from failures and actually sitting down to extract those lessons. Natalia offers concrete practices for turning blame into growth, from the "magic five whys" to building feedback loops that don't just stroke our egos.

Once an accountant, Natalia Romanska is now a QA. She is a fan of a holistic approach to Quality Assurance - the one that begins with neatly designed processes and thoughtful planning. She truly enjoys having things balanced, both in private and professional life. After hours, you’ll find her rewatching Friends, exploring new destinations, and always on the hunt for the next great scent

Highlights:

• Every failure teaches more than success; analyze what went wrong without emotions involved.
• Compare yourself with your past self, not with others' curated social media successes.
• Building self-awareness requires personality tests, manager feedback, and understanding your biases.
• Give yourself time to feel emotions first, then objectively analyze failures for learnings.
• Each failure is unique; there's no universal pattern, only case-by-case lessons learned.

More Links with Insights:

• Testwarez