We have a small product and eng team, and are too early to have QA. Do you recommend we have eng test their own features? Is this the job of the product? Also should we have QA as part of our sprint, or the subsequent sprint?

I’m a strong believer in product/feature teams owning their deliverables end to end, which includes not only product definition and development, but also testing and validation. This is even more important in an early-stage environment, where moving quickly means engineers will need to make game-time design decisions day-in and day-out. Eng and PM should collaborate closely to ensure the quality of the feature being worked on. I recommend engineers incorporate testing as part of their developmen ...Read More

QA testing is a minimum requirement for every story - shipping untested features leads to compounding quality issues that are harder to untangle later, which will slow down overall velocity. On small teams, it’s critical to clearly define roles, including who owns QA. This ensures coverage regardless of function or team size.PMs should be involved in QA to validate the end-to-end user experience, and that requirements have been met. In smaller or earlier stage teams, QA becomes a cross-functiona ...Read More

Quality is everyone’s responsibility. It’s not just a role. It’s a mindset that needs to be built into how the team works, from planning through delivery. Here’s how I approach it: Everyone owns quality. Engineers focus on robustness and should think through edge cases. Design and PMs define what “good” looks like and help identify gaps or inconsistencies. Quality should be part of every discipline’s contribution, not delegated to a single person or role. Automated tests are a baseline. Unit, in ...Read More

I recommend triangulation as much as is possible. Without a QA function, engineering should be checking to make sure from a technical standpoint that what they have built works. Product and design should also be checking to make sure that the experience you have been cultivating is going to create the positive experience for your customers you intend. I prefer to have each of the functions check to make sure we are shipping quality.  The most important thing is that QA happens when development i ...Read More

With AI products, Product Managers need to step up their involvement in testing. Specifically, Evals (evaluations)must become a mandatory part of every PM’s toolkit to ensure model performance, safety, and alignment with customer needs. PMs can also directly support integration testing by defining and validating end-to-end user workflows. More foundational tests like unit testing, stress testing, and scalability testing remain the core responsibility of Engineering, with PMs providing necessary ...Read More

Its great question. We have bunch of teams where dedicated QA role didn't exist, Making sure product quality is up-to required goal was left on developers, Product Managers and early Beta customers. This approach works best with early stage of product adoption, that has limited uses cases and great "MTTR" once issue have identified to anything missed can be quickly resolved. We also have teams where everything has dedicated QA role, These are team where product is deployed in multiple vertical/g ...Read More

Having a QA team ranges from company to company, but I personally believe it's important for engineers to test their own features so they feel more ownership over the quality of what they've built. Often engineers test continuously while building so they can fix bugs as they arise and not be overwhelmed by how much they have to test at the end. Once they feel good about the product quality and have double checked that what they've built meets product requirements, they can organize a "bug bashin ...Read More