Introduction: A Story About an Unexpected Opportunity
Around a year ago, my manager approached me with an unexpected request: our Robotic Process Automation (RPA) specialist had left the company out of the blue leaving everyone quite shocked, and so my manager asked if I could pick up the topic. My immediate reaction was uncertainty: I knew nothing about RPA beyond the full form of the acronym; I had no experience at all.
I asked for a day or two to think it over. My mind raced with questions, I had no idea what I would do or how different it could be from my current role. But then, I asked myself a simple question: “what worse can happen?” If I failed, I would still have my existing job. But if I succeeded, there was so much more to gain.
So, I decided to give it a try and said yes – and it was a turning point. I took on the role, performed well (if I say so myself), and was promoted from “Global IT Test Manager” to “Global IT Quality and Automation Manager.”
I’m telling you this story because these moments where we’re saying yes to a challenge, where we’re taking a calculated risk, those are what shape a career. This article is about the key skills and mindset shifts I learned on my journey from a technical specialist to a leadership position. My hope is that by sharing what I’ve learned, I can help other QA professionals forge their own paths to growth.
1. The Three Foundational Pillars of Growth
Sustainable career growth isn’t accidental; it’s built on a strategic foundation. In my experience, this foundation rests on three core pillars: continuously expanding your knowledge, building unshakeable confidence, and developing a healthy appetite for risk. Mastering these interconnected areas is crucial for any QA professional who wants to move from doing the work to leading the work.
Pillar 1: Continuously Expand Your Knowledge
Just as a person’s body expands as they grow, a professional’s understanding, experience, and coverage of different areas must also expand. To move up, you have to cover more topics than you are normally doing.
Over the course of my career, I’ve had to learn about manual testing, test management, test automation, performance testing, automation, RPA, project managers, operate management, and operations. Am I an expert in any of these fields? I would say no. But the goal isn’t to become the world’s foremost authority on every topic: the goal is to develop a broader perspective.
The key is to shift from a specialist’s deep dive to a leader’s “helicopter view.” You need to know enough to help you with your role, work effectively with your stakeholders, and explain complex things in simple language. This breadth of knowledge allows you to talk to the experts, understand their challenges, and make informed decisions at a higher level.
Pillar 2: Build Unshakeable Confidence
Confidence in a leadership context isn’t about arrogance; it’s the willingness to constantly challenge yourself and step out of your comfort zone. This is a muscle you build through deliberate action and a process of trial and error. You won’t hit the jackpot on your first try, but every attempt makes you more resilient.
Here are some practical actions that build this kind of confidence:
- Learn a new skill: Whether it’s a new technology or a new methodology, the act of learning stretches your capabilities.
- Pick up a new role: Voluntarily take on new responsibilities on yourself, even small ones, to show initiative and broaden your experience.
- Understand your product in the market: Step outside the IT department! Go into the market and see how your product is actually performing and being used.
- Learn to say “no” when necessary: Confidence also means protecting your focus and energy, which we’ll discuss later.
Pushing your boundaries introduces you to new people, new challenges, and new opportunities that you would never encounter by staying comfortable.
Pillar 3: Cultivate a Healthy Appetite for Risk
Growth requires some amount of risk, this is a universal truth. The story about taking on the RPA role is a perfect example of a calculated risk, as I didn’t know if I would succeed, but I knew the potential reward outweighed the potential for failure.
To get comfortable with risk, you need to reframe your definition of failure. I operate under a simple philosophy: every opportunity is either a win or a lesson learned. So there is no loss over there. You can either win or learn a new lesson when you’re a failure. With this mindset, you remove the fear and focus on the outcome.
Trust your gut feeling. Take the decision, and then focus all your energy on making it the right one. This proactive approach to risk is what separates those who wait for opportunities from those who create them. It’s the engine that powers the journey from a team member to a team leader.
2. Beyond Code: The Art of Influence and Communication
As you move into leadership, your success becomes less about your individual technical output and more about your ability to communicate value, align teams, and influence stakeholders. Your technical skills get you in the door, but your ability to translate that technical value into business impact is what earns you a seat at the table. These are the critical “soft skills” that many technical professionals overlook.
Cater to Your Audience: Simplify Your Story
The most important rule of communication is to think from the perspective of the person on the other side of the table. What do they want to know? What matters to them?
You might be incredibly proud of the nitty-gritty technical details of a new tool you implemented. But if you’re presenting to someone in finance, they have a different set of priorities. A finance guy wants to know how much money are we spending, and how much are we saving. If you can’t answer that, your message “doesn’t land,” and from their perspective, the work has no value. Tailoring your message isn’t just good practice but an essential for your work to be recognized and appreciated.
Embrace Storytelling
Not only children love stories, adults in a business context love them as well. A presentation filled with facts and figures but no narrative is boring and forgettable, and once your audience loses interest, you can’t influence them.
A good business story provides context and makes your work relatable. It doesn’t have to be complicated. The first thing you must always answer is why. Start there, then follow a simple, logical sequence:
- Why was this work necessary?
- When was it done?
- How was it done?
- What was the result?
Structuring your updates and presentations this way keeps your audience engaged and ensures they understand the full impact of what you and your team have accomplished.
Market and Sell Your Work
Many testers I’ve worked with believe that if they just work hard, their manager will notice and they’ll be rewarded. I used to think that way too. But I learned that it doesn’t work like that.
Your manager likely has many direct reports – five, ten, maybe even fifty. They simply cannot keep track of everyone’s individual achievements in detail. As I learned, the one who shouts the most or the one who talks to the manager the most is the one he knows more about. You have to take responsibility for making your contributions visible. This isn’t bragging; it’s a part of your job.
Here are a few actionable ways to market your team’s value:
- Highlight your achievements: Proactively keep your manager updated on your good work. Don’t wait for your one-on-one to mention a major success.
- Communicate impact: If you find a bug that was very critical, go to your manager, have a coffee with her and tell her what you did, how amazing it was, and how nobody else was able to find it. Don’t be shy.
- Present in larger forums: If your company has an “IT connect call” or a similar town hall meeting, volunteer to present your team’s achievements. This gives your work visibility across the entire organization.
Communicating your value effectively is the bridge between doing great work and being recognized as a leader who delivers it.
3. Adopting a True Leadership Mindset
The final step in the transition to leadership is an internal one. It requires a fundamental shift in how you view your role, your knowledge, and your responsibilities. Just as a child’s body expands as they grow into an adult, your brain, experience, and influence must expand as you take the next steps in your career. It’s about letting go of the habits that made you a great individual contributor to make room for the new habits that will make you a great leader.
Get Comfortable Not Knowing Everything
As your area of influence expands, it becomes impossible to keep up with everything or be an expert in every topic. A common trap for new leaders is trying to hold onto the details. They still want to know, “How many defects were found? What was the criticality of each one?”
This behavior, while often well-intentioned, turns you into a micromanager. Trust me, nobody likes micromanagers. It sucks their productivity; nobody likes to work with them and a lot of people will eventually change teams, leave, or get burned out. Don’t be that person.
The correct approach is to delegate, trust your team, and develop that “helicopter view.” You just need to know the basic details and the latest status overview. However, you must understand the basic concepts and jargon of your field. As a manager, you talk to many different companies, vendors, and teams. If you don’t understand the basic concepts of what you are doing, they can easily fool you. Your job is to guide the team, not to do their jobs for them.
The Strategic Power of Saying “No”
I know I started this article by talking about the importance of saying “yes” to challenges. So, it might seem contradictory to now tell you to say “no.” But there’s a crucial difference between taking on strategic challenges and becoming a “yes man.”
If you say yes to every request, people will start throwing things at you that aren’t aligned with your goals. You’ll end up overwhelmed, burnt out, and unable to deliver on your most important commitments. The key is to be strategic.
Here is the personal framework I use to decide:
- First, I think about where I want to be in 10 years. I define my long-term career goal.
- Then, I use an analogy. If my goal is to become a train driver, saying yes to learning to drive a bike, a motorbike, a bus, and a truck all make sense – they are steps along that path. But if someone asks if I want to learn to operate a forklift or take piano lessons, the answer is no. Those things don’t fit my path.
You must be in charge of your own career path. Say yes to the opportunities that move you toward your goal. Say no, politely but firmly, to the ones that don’t.
Conclusion: Earn Your Title, Don’t Wait for It
If there is one thing to take away from my journey, it’s this: career advancement works in a specific order. The key lesson is that you don’t get a title and then get the responsibilities; it works the other way around. You must first pick up more responsibility and show them that you can do it, and then you get a better title. The promotion and the new title are the result of that proactive expansion, not the prerequisite for it.
I hope you can take a leaf out of my journey and use it in your own experience. I wish you good luck in your careers and would be very happy to connect on LinkedIn to answer any further questions.
