Quality Coach Career Paths
Change at the best of times is hard. Clarity on quality coach career paths enables those impacted to make clear and informed decisions on the role. It provides engineering leadership structures to support career growth.
Companies seeing the benefits of a quality coach role also need to put in place structures & career paths to help individuals, teams and management in engineering understand how this new role fits within the existing engineering structure. One element of this is creating quality coaching career paths.
Change at the best of times is hard. Clarity on quality coach career paths enables those impacted to make clear and informed decisions on the role. In addition, it provides engineering leadership structures to support career growth. Useful if you don't have a background in quality and your managing quality professionals.
There's not a lot of data out there on career paths for quality coaches. Apart from this site, descriptions of the quality coach roles and responsibilities, even less what a career path looks like, are few and far between.
In this article, I share my perspective on this element of quality coaching.
Quality Coach Role Levels
Let's assume that your company has a tiered progressive career path that begins at Tier 1 and goes up to say Tier 6. This tiered model applies to everyone. For example, delivery leads, engineers, designers, SREs & leadership.
In this model, the quality coach role begins at Tier 3, progressing to Tier 4, and peaking at Tier 5. Here's an example:
- Tier 1: Not Applicable
- Tier 2: Not Applicable
- Tier 3: Quality Coach
- Tier 4: Staff Quality Coach
- Tier 5: Principal Quality Coach
- Tier 6: Not Applicable
Why no Quality Coach Tier 1 or Tier 2?
The Quality Coach role is not junior. You don't put someone straight out of school or university in charge of coaching people on how to write code. Similarly, you don't ask junior quality professionals to coach engineering professionals on software testing.
Quality Coaches are experienced individuals who have invested significant time in their craft. They have a combination of domain knowledge, testing experience and technical capability. With experience and confidence under their belt, they're in a position to look at a quality coaching role.
Why no Tier 6 Quality Coach?
My experience is roles beyond Tier 5 goes beyond one speciality. Quality is no exception.
You could argue for a Tier 6 VP of Quality, but I've yet to see this justification. Instead, you might see a quality coach moving to the VP of a Foundations Squad, providing enablement services encompassing security, reliability, availability, devrel and quality. A squad drives a suite of services, tools and processes to enable product teams to focus on what they want to do well, deliver quality product features. For this article, I've focused on the mid-tiers.
Quality Coach Career Tiers
In the table below, I outline three core Quality Coach levels, T3, T4 & T5, with titles Quality Coach, Staff Quality Coach and Principal Quality Coach. Of course, you can use different titles as you see fit.
To identify and understand the differences between Tier 3, 4 and 5 Quality Coaches and offer accountability and ownership, I use four core factors.
Quality Coach Factors
When I work out Quality Coach tiers, I use the following factors to determine accountability and ownership.
The following sections describe these areas in more detail.
Sphere of influence
When I coach quality professionals to become quality coaches, I describe their goal as to become dispensable. By this, I mean, they coach a team until the team maintains a level of quality with minimal intervention.
When a quality coach can successfully achieve this goal, they are ready to increase their scope of influence by coaching across several teams or perhaps a squad.
The challenges required to coach effectively at this level are different.
Instead of day to day involvement, they must begin to work out how to drive quality at a strategic level. There's significant growth required to reach this level, requiring the quality coach to 'leave behind' being in the presence of work, focusing on more abstract concepts.
As a quality coach gains experience, the scope of influence increases, from one squad to multiple squads, eventually across all engineering. To avoid 'doing all the things' and not achieving 'any of the things', a Principal Quality Coach prioritises one element of quality to drive and achieve that success. For example, a Principle Quality Coach may focus on creating and driving the test automation strategy across engineering.
Coaching Focus
Quality Coaches who are starting begin by coaching team members. These could be engineers, design, UX, SRE. Whatever makes up the cross-functional team.
As their coaching muscle strengthens, who they coach also begins to change. They start to focus on coaching leadership roles. This makes sense. A quality coach is one person, and to effectively coach and influence; they need to coach those who can influence the team. This means quality coaches extend to coaching Delivery Leads and Team Leads.
And, Quality Coaches need to coach upwards. They need to learn how to influence and put forward proposals to senior engineering required to influence strategy and budget. As the quality coach gains experience, who they impact matters.
A quality coach should also learn to coach other quality coaches through 1:1 coaching and develop workshops to coach and train teams on specific skillsets.
Flow of Delivery
A quality coach begins by coaching teams on software testing activities performed within the 'flow of delivery'. They help engineers understand what makes a good test, develop good acceptance criteria, encourage collaboration across teams when required. They help coach test automation or help expand domain knowledge.
The coaching focuses on helping teams develop software testing muscle. (I call this software testing muscle because, like any muscle, doing testing is what drives muscle growth.)
As the quality coach gains experience, and as teams become less dependent on them, they can begin to think of how to influence the quality of future work. Quality Coaches start to explore how to improve quality across squads systematically. For example, systematically looking at ways to build quality in, not patched on at the end.
They begin to provide input into leadership discussions on squad planning, what needs to be considered, and ensuring quality at the squad leadership level is everyone's responsibility.
At Tier 5, this planning and strategising extends to the whole of engineering and beyond. The quality coach begins to look at support and sales and how quality impacts other dimensions of the organisation. This makes sense; we are delivering service, not products and how we maintain quality is equally as important as building quality products.
Coaching Ability
Coaching is a skilled activity. Exercising coaching skills improves capability. The more you coach, the better you become at coaching. As you diversify who and what you coach on, you become more capable and effective in your coaching.
A significant element of coaching skills is encouraging self-discovery. Although it's easy to fall into telling teams what they should be testing, a quality coach helps teams discover their test coverage. The latter requires active listening and resisting to urge to offer solutions.
It's also easy to fall into coaching everyone about everything. Given the nature of the role, this is an impossible task. Instead, you have to begin identifying what I call coaching moments. Opportunities that appear throughout the day that you recognise where coaching will be supremely beneficial.
Situational leadership offers insights into when to coach, train or mentor, but practicing is what makes you confident in your coaching moment. You rarely create coaching moments. Instead, it's about being available, listening, identifying an opportunity and seizing it.
Context matters!
If you take these four elements, combine them with the quality coach role description you can create a career path that suits your company.
Quality Coaching is a great way to help quality professionals acquire more leadership skills. This is because quality coaching is leadership. It's about influencing groups of people, providing appropriate incentives to own quality collectively. And let's face it, if you can do that for quality, you can lead anything in tech.
One more piece of advice
I wrote this article with corporate career growth in mind. The purpose is to assist engineering management in developing quality coach career paths.
I've found my career path to be anything but linear. As a humanoid first and quality coach second, my advice to anyone is this. Own your career growth.
Understand and be loyal to your path and goals. Take the elements of this role and mould it into a career path that suits you. And be open to changing direction if needs be. And be open to trying new paths that are perhaps outside of who you perceived yourself to be. I've known quality coaches who have become engineering managers, product owners, SREs and directors of quality engineering.
Enjoy the journey!
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