Product Managers and Software Testers – The Perfect Tandem

In my latest blog post, that I wrote on the Applause blog, I wrote about the relationship between product managers and software testers. Im my career, I worked for more than 10 years as professional software tester and was always working really close with my product managers. Now that I have changed my role to product management, I really see the big benefits in working close together with the product manager as a tandem. 

Depending on the people, the collaboration between each other can be challenging. One of the most important things to establish is a good relationship between the product manager and the software tester. However, this not only applies between the two but rather for the whole team.

Having a healthy and happy work environment helps a lot to reach hard challenges in the product development phase.

Here is a short excerpt from the article that I wrote and published on the Applause blog.

Why Product Managers Should Have a Close Relationship with Software Testers

A fully staffed agile software development team consists of different disciplines. There is usually one product manager, an agile coach, multiple developers, an interaction and visual designer and last but not least a software tester. The software tester in the team, usually has a challenging, but critical role. This person not only has to define test cases, execute the tests, write test automation or define test data but also help the team to establish a quality mindset and to make quality a whole team effort. Furthermore, software testers in a team have lots of knowledge about the product being developed and the users using it afterwards.

This is valuable knowledge might be helpful for the product manager to discover and to define new products or features.

Support Technical Work and Quality Thinking

The product manager usually defines the work of a team. In most cases the team is focussing on delivering features to the customers. However, software products also need architectural re-work as well as maintenance efforts. As part of this, software testers as well as the whole team should get the support by the product manager to invest time to work on such topics. 

The technical work, including test automation must always be a priority during the planning of product development and the product manager must support the team in this. Often enough test automation is scoped out of a product due to time pressure. However, it’s essential for the product that quality measures are always in place and the product manager must support this. If a product manager denies such work, the product will suffer from poor quality and unhappy users in the long run.

You want to know more about this topic? Please, read the full  article here:

https://www.applause.com/blog/product-manager-relationship-software-testers

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