Is it even feasible? What skills do I need to learn and unlearn in order to transition from QA to Product Management role.
Well, a lot of companies want to hire product managers who have had a QA or support background – but then, they look for that extra spark.
What’s that extra spark? Can anybody do this?
First, let’s talk about the QA role. A great QA professional has extremely sharp attention to detail skills (can identify bugs like a James Bond); and this helps tremendously in the (smooth) transition to a product management role.
QA Can Zoom like a PM
The smartest QA professionals are really good at zooming out and then zooming in.
Wait!!!
What’s zooming out and zooming in?
Zooming-out is taking a high-level view – that is, from feature to a product and then to business side of things, from user story to user journey, i.e. evaluate everything from multiple stakeholders’ perspective.
Zooming-in is just the opposite – that is, go deep into the product and the feature set. What works and what doesn’t? How should the user experience be? What should the user do? You wanna have a red button or a blue one? Which one works in what context? What are the edge cases?
Tell me, who handles all these in a product team? Ideally, a curious QA team member !
Note: Not all QA professionals are really fit to transition to product management role. One of the main challenges I see with many QA professionals is that they don’t question others a lot. That is, they do not question the features, the user flow etc and tend to just test without really worrying about the user experience – that doesn’t really fly in product management career.
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