5 Reasons Why Product Managers Need to Know QA
Product Management, emphasis on “Product”
Product Managers come from a variety of professional backgrounds, making each PM hard to compare to the next based on their unique skills and knowledge. Not every PM needs to have development experience to successfully manage a release nor do they need to have a rich history of Customer Success know-how to understand how to synthesize information from customer conversations. Regardless of professional background and skill set, a valuable PM should have a great amount of experience with the product they are trying to manage.
Many PMs stand off to the side, make product declarations, and wonder why they are misfiring. Without a deep understanding of your product, you will make misguided decisions.
Instead, when you are in the trenches of your product every day, you eliminate the risk of erroneous decisions because you deeply grasp the fundamental aspects of your product, how it is used by consumers, and how it can be bolstered for future enhancements.
And there is no better way to quickly and efficiently learn about all facets of your product than by QAing the everloving hell out of it.
What makes QA so special?
Quality Assurance Engineers not only have to test the functionality of every feature, bug fix, end point, and all other operating areas within a product, they have to think of all the different ways a human can possibly interact with it. QA Engineering is a creative position that requires a certain level of detail and obsession over human interaction. Great QA Engineers are skilled at imagining user stories across the entire product to mimic possible end-user behavior, making them the people who often know the product best.
They cannot simply test a feature to see if it works. Instead, they must consider all the ways in which the customer is going to utilize the feature. A product may have been designed with a straight-forward use case in mind, but the product also needs to handle all the other innovative and creative ways in which a customer uses it to solve their problem.
While QA Engineers use their skills for finding bugs and maintaining the integrity of the product, a Product Manager can use these skills to heavily impact the product’s success.
QA will make you a better PM
To understand your product’s limitations and flexibility, its weak points and strong areas, the features that always break and the old dusty features that always work, and most importantly the users that interact with the product because that user is you is the absolute best possible way to know the product better than anyone else.
- QA makes your Product Requirement Documents stronger and more thorough because you can anticipate and avoid UX problems.
- QA saves design and development time because you will already know which areas in the product to avoid and which features you can reclaim and renovate for new products.
- QA helps you empathize with customers and ask deeper-digging questions because you have experienced their use case first-hand.
- QA allows you to eliminate pain points before they reach a customer because you have lived through them first.
- QA helps you utilize your product in new ways you hadn’t considered, opening up new product opportunities and positioning strategies.
So ask your QA team for a copy of their master test plan (or better yet, make your own as you go) and start to truly get to know the ins and outs of your own product. Your customers and prospects will thank you.
