About success and failure

In the early days of the internet, Yahoo was the dominant web portal, while Google was just a new search engine. In 1998, Google’s founders approached Yahoo to sell their search engine for $1 million. Yahoo declined the offer because they wanted to focus on keeping users on their site rather than directing them to other portals. By 2012, Yahoo was losing relevance due to new players like Google and Facebook, and that same year, Marissa Mayer was hired as Yahoo’s CEO with the goal of reviving the company and restoring its competitiveness.

A sunlit forest path symbolizes the journey from failure to success, with light guiding the way through challenges.

The first time I heard about Marissa was in March 2011, when she interviewed Lady Gaga. At that time, she had a prominent career at Google, being its first female engineer and employee number 20. That interview went viral, and I remember I was working in one of my first IT jobs. Since then, she became a role model for me. When she joined Yahoo, the press reported every step she took, and it was easy for me to keep track of her moves.

We all know how Yahoo’s story ended, but there is more to tell and learn than just the final outcome. Under Marissa Mayer’s direction, important cultural changes happened, and the products were modernized, which put the company in a position to be sold to Verizon for approximately $4.4 billion in 2017.

Writing about this story, it’s impossible not to think about the decisions I’ve made throughout my career—some that delivered great results, and others that weren’t so good and are still resonating in my mind.

Beyond business outcomes, success and failure are deeply personal experiences -and they shape how we think, feel, and act.

The feeling of succeeding and failing

On March 15th, 2026, Kimi Antonelli won the Chinese Grand Prix in Shanghai. I am not a fan of Formula 1, but my husband is, and we were watching the race together. When Kimi stepped onto the podium, he was very emotional and started crying. At 19 years old, this victory meant a lot—not only to him, but to an entire country. Italy had not celebrated a win like this since 2006, and 20 years later, that moment finally came.

Succeeding is contagious. The images around a celebration reflect joy and happiness. Our brain releases dopamine, which makes us feel motivated, positive, and eager to repeat that experience.

When we fail, the feeling is the opposite. We feel stressed, disappointed, and sometimes even scared of the consequences. Failure hurts; it affects your confidence and your ego. Even though failure is natural—because we are human and not perfect—the pursuit of success is constant in our lives. It often feels like both concepts are tightly connected, and in many ways, they are.

There is a popular saying attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt: “Learn from the mistakes of others. You can't live long enough to make them all yourself.” When we do retrospectives, we usually try to learn from our errors and identify patterns that prevent us from going in the wrong direction again. But what if our brains are more influenced by success than by failure?

In an article published by Scientific American, “How You Learn More from Success Than Failure,” neuroscientist Earl Miller shares research suggesting that success has a stronger influence on our brains than failure. Brain cells may learn more effectively when we do something right than when we get it wrong. This may explain why, at times, we feel like we are repeating the same mistakes.

Learning from mistakes and focusing on success

Last year, on one of the platforms we work on, we were experiencing a high number of errors. The more we tried to fix them, the more stuck we felt. We use DORA metrics to measure software quality, and our failure rate was between 12% and 14%, which is quite high. It was a challenging process to understand what needed to change—not only in our development practices, but also in the culture we want to build within our teams.

Over time, we learned a lot. We were able to identify patterns, adjust our approach, and focus on what was actually working. We reduced our failure rate to between 5% and 8%, moving closer to elite performance. Now, we are working with other teams to share these lessons and help them better understand their processes and people. We learned from what went wrong, we grew, and we focused on what we want to repeat.

As I write this, I am also sharing it with my team. I want our mantra for this year to be: “Learn and grow together.” Share our experiences—not only the difficult ones—and stay focused on the things we want to repeat.

Because in the end, progress doesn’t come from just fixing what went wrong. It comes from understanding what works—and being disciplined enough to do it again and again.

We often spend a lot of time analyzing failure, but not enough time understanding and reinforcing success.

Marissa Mayer is still a personal role model for me. She is a reminder that you can be capable and still fail—and that failure does not define the outcome. What truly matters is having the clarity to learn, and the discipline to keep moving forward.