How to explain Quality Coach (to your CTO)

At some point, an engineering manager, principal engineer, delivery lead, or product manager is going to ask you "exactly what does a quality coach do?". Be ready for this question. Here's an explainer that frames the role in their terms.

Why in their terms?

When people hear something new, they relate it to their existing knowledge. In this case, probably either that of a QA or an agile coach. This is normal, it's our brain way of adding (or rejecting) new knowledge into our existing brain's mental model of what a quality professional does.

I use this to my advantage. I've come up with a way of describing the quality coach role in terms of roles people are familiar with. I describe the quality coach role in terms of a delivery lead, a product manager, a quality professional and a software developer. The following is an overview of how those roles relate to quality.

Software Tester

Knowing how to test software is really useful if you're going to coach others on software testing, especially that concept of risk and how it applies to test coverage. Core knowledge includes:

• Being able to identify and assess risk (both technical and business risks)
• Skilled at test design
• Skilled at software test patterns (heuristics and oracles)
• Skilled at test strategy creation
• Skilled at test reporting
• Skilled at software testing

Delivery Lead

A quality coach requires good knowledge of the delivery process, the rituals being observed. Here are the types of 'delivery lead skills' I look in a quality coach:

• The ability to develop ways of working and processes for a team
• Collaborate & encourage teams to adopt new approaches
• Data led decision making
• Facilitate discussions and hold facilitated workshops to gain consensus
• Hold retrospectives and encourage learning feedback cycles

Software Developer

Quality coaches assist software engineers to improve their software test automation skills. Here are some of the tasks they might perform:

• A testing strategy for test automation
• Advice on testability, observability & reliability
• Building & maintaining CI/CD pipelines
• Product & Test Code Reviews
• Injecting quality into the branching strategy

Product Manager

A Product Manager manages the entire product lifecycle and product roadmap. A quality coach has extensive product knowledge and how people interact with that product.

• Knowledge of features, systems and integrations
• Domain knowledge and competitors
• Knowledge of and what our customer looks like
• Knowledge of sales and support and how they work to quality

It's not just the product knowledge that is essential, as product managers, quality coaches need to be able to:

• Have a vision for quality & develop strategies to enable that vision to be implemented
• Facilitate workshops that allow for teams to contribute ideas on how to improve and measure quality
• Identify quality-related work and develop roadmaps to drive change
• prioritise quality-related against existing backlog work
• report on progress

Two Quality Coach Streams

Looking at the tasks and skills above, it's clear that having one person able to fill all capabilities is rare. This is why I split to role into two quality coach streams.

A technical quality coach tends to work predominantly with software engineers, focused on tooling and helping engineers improve their test automation. Product quality coaches have a focus on the whole product, the product lifecycle and its roadmap, identifying risk early on, and working with product managers to build quality into features.

And even within these streams, you will discover people have capabilities in one area compared to another. That is to be expected.

And, you might not need all these skills for your particular context. The sliders below show how you can blend the skillsets to suit the context you work in and the state of quality you have at this point in time.

Personally, I like to lean into diversity, having quality coaches with different strengths. That way all aspects of quality can be considered and fit your companies ideology on quality. For me, quality is building the right product, building the product right and the right service to continue an ongoing relationship with your customer. You and your company may have a different view and definition of quality and so a quality coach may look different for you.